FAQ

Is there a future for Daemon_9?

Perhaps if someone comes along with a better plan for bringing it to a wide audience — like some influencer with zillions of followers, or a major gaming company with an established audience — it could be resurrected and re-launched. Possibly even re-imagined and enhanced. I’m open to it. But, apart from this archival site, I have no expectation of any future life for Daemon_9.

What’s the story, anyway?

Here’s the storyline of Daemon_9, unpacked and laid out in linear fashion…

Several years ago, Tai Jianguo, a senior engineer at Chinese chip giant GUI (and son of its CEO) became obsessed with the ancient Chinese warrior-god Chiyou Zhou. Throughout history, pockets of crazies have formed cults of worship around Chiyou Zhou, always ending in death and destruction. The myth has it that he will one day return to earth to enslave humanity. Tai Jianguo, after killing a lab full of workers at a GUI plant as a blood sacrifice, took his own life with the aim of becoming the resurrected god himself. Before he died, he embedded some secret code — the Daemon_9 virus — into the company’s popular D9 microprocessor. The D9 chip is present somewhere in nearly every computer on the market — thereby providing a doorway into the lives of millions of unsuspecting computer users around the world.

One such unfortunate user is Morgan Shane, a 19-year-old college student in central California. Her mother has bought her a top-of-the-line laptop as a birthday present and it quickly becomes Morgan’s prized possession. But she soon becomes obsessed with the strange messages and images she is seeing on its screen, which seem to brainwash her and transform her personality over the course of several months.

Part of the Chiyou Zhou legend is that he cannot fully come to power until he finds a replacement for his murdered bride. Morgan, we learn, is one-sixteenth Chinese, making her a particular target of interest for the newly resurrected Chiyou Zhou.

One night, at the behest of voices over her laptop, Morgan murders her best friend and roommate, Anna Hendricks, who has been prying dangerously into Morgan’s downward spiral. She then goes on a bloody spree before disappearing, seemingly into thin air.

Adam was one of Morgan’s classmates at Colfax College. A computer geek who ran the campus-based ISP, Adam had a crush on Morgan and kept tabs on her by watching all the video clips that Anna, an aspiring filmmaker, took of them and stored on the campus servers. From those videos, he knew just how close the two girls were, so he suspects that there’s more to Anna’s murder and Morgan’s disappearance than meets the eye. He starts digging and creates the website SaveMorganShane.org to enlist help from the public.

Meanwhile, GUI is eager to erase any connection it has to the Colfax College murders. Still trying to salvage its image after the chip plant massacre of the previous year, GUI takes financial control of Vista Education Group, the parent company of Colfax College. Then it promptly shuts down the school’s ISP and seizes its servers before ultimately forcing the closure of the school itself.

Realizing that a rogue amateur sleuth is out there trying to expose the truth, GUI presses its new trading partner — the US government — to hunt and kill Adam. Thanks to his computer skills, Adam stays one step ahead of the hit squads, but he’s constantly on the run, hiding out in seedy motels, surfacing only to further his quest to rescue Morgan.

And here’s where you enter the picture.

One day, you "stumble" upon the SaveMorganShane.org website (or explore the Steam version) and Morgan chooses to reach out to you with a cry for help from her imprisonment in Chiyou Zhou’s hellish dimension. Now, like it or not, you are "involved" — which makes you another target for GUI and its assassins as well as for Chiyou Zhou, the most ruthless and bloodthirsty of all the demons of Hell. Oh, and by the way, there’s a D9 chip in your computer and D9 virus is now rapidly taking control of your system, giving Chiyou Zhou a wide-open portal into your life.

Your only chance to save yourself — and all of humanity — is to find and save Morgan and destroy Chiyou Zhou before it’s too late.

Is anything in Daemon_9 real?

None of the characters or entities in Daemon_9 are real. Chiyou Zhou, GUI, Colfax College, Vista Education, Angels of kOs are all fictional. But the pervasive influence of giant tech companies and data security fears were barely a blip on our radar when I wrote D9. Now they’re both huge, global problems that only seem to be worsening. TikTok is an example of the troubling threat some perceive in invasive technology from China. So, there’s that. And a lot of small, regional colleges are owned by private, for-profit corporations. (Maybe you knew that, but I didn’t before researching it.) And loosely-knit bands of both good and bad hackers are constantly working the fringes of the internet.

Any cool Easter eggs or hidden stuff you can now share?

—The word "gui" means demon or ghost in the traditional Chinese and the indigenous Chinese religion. (In modern Chinese, it means “expensive,” something I maybe should’ve paid closer attention to.)

—Yes that’s me playing Milos. For what it’s worth, I changed the color of my eyes to a weird grey — not an easy post-production task!

—If you pay attention during Scene #13, the “frat party” scene, Adam makes an appearance.

—On the Vista Education Group website, if you went to the contact page and sent an email to the contact listed there, you would get an out-of-office response that included a clue to the password needed to get through the GUI back door. (Not active anymore, so don't bother.)

What did it cost to make?

I’d rather not say. But there are feature films that cost less and there are cars that cost more. Add to that whatever value can be placed on 5+ years of my own sweat equity. But I got a lot of freebies from some generous people, too. And even the team members who were paid all went far above and beyond.

Is there a way to capture or experience the original version of Daemon_9?

Unfortunately, no. I tried to re-create it on a local server so I could do a video walk-through, but the code was so intricate and had changed so much since that original version, it was just too difficult to piece back together—even for me, the guy who created it. But the Steam version captured here duplicates the vast majority of the original experience.

Do you plan to create any other games in the same vein?

I’m not ruling it out, as it still fascinates me as a storytelling genre. My hope for Daemon_9 was that it would be just profitable enough to sustain making a whole series of movie/games just like it. That didn’t happen, but I still might return to the medium one day.

Is demonic possession real?

No. There’s no such things as demons, angels, ghosts, gods, vampires, zombies or leprechauns. They make for good stories, but they’re all inventions of human imagination. You heard it here first.