We are about to leave the old office to move in a new, bigger one, better served, better built, with a lot of nice restaurants around and a subway which is only 20 meters away from the office door.
The old office, which is still dear to me, lately looks like a fragile empty shell. On one side, the COVID made it impossible for the team to keep working all together in the same space. On the another side, all the furniture’s are now being slowly packed and prepared for the moving. Its like observing the slow death of an ancient animal that was once magnificent.
This is not where Mario+Rabbids was born, with 5 desperate designers closed inside a small room doing overtime for a months and a half, but it’s still an important place for us as it’s where we coodeveloped the game with Paris. This is the office where we finished the last effort on the game and cherished it. Seeing it like that, deprived of the people, of their noises, laughter’s, stress and late night dinners, makes it look very fragile.
This is probably why I’ve experienced the series of strange events that happened one month ago. Maybe, after all, I was too tired to see and think in a straight and clear way. Maybe It was only a mere sequence of coincidences in a moment of fatigue and suggestion for me.
Everything started with a Book. Not a simple book, but an audio book: The call of Cthulhu, by H.P Lovecraft narrated by the voice of John W. Michaels.
The book has been written in the 1926 and then Publisher around the 1928 by the Weird Tales magazine. Amongst the various stories of Lovecraft, this is the only one where this alien creature, Cthulhu, makes a major appearance.
We had been working so hard in the last period of time, that lately I've started eating quickly in front of the monitor, while working, so that I could use the time I normally would have spent on my lunch break, to go to the last of the meeting room inside the office, and take the opportunity to rest my eyes, lie down on the sofa and lose myself in the mysterious and fascinating tales of H-P Lovecraft's fiction. The structure of our office building it’s quite simple and boring. The whole office is at the first floor of a building that run straights for 100 meters (330 feet), surrounded by other office building of various brands such as Ferrari, Maserati, BMW, Mini, Harley and many, many others cars brand so, when I want to go to the last meeting room, I have to walk the entire length of the office, till the very end.
Nowadays the last of the meeting rooms has been transformed in a super high-tech conference room, with all the latest in term of technology to allow calls between studios in different part of the world, just a month before the COVID kicked in, so in these days it’s just an unused room.
The ex meeting room, now a brand new and unused conference room, is furnished with a comfy couch for quick naps.
I remember that the day were the first strange event occurred, I couldn’t wait to go on the couch and rest a bit. Since in the last few weeks I was immersed, maybe a bit too much, in the beautiful tales of H.P Lovecraft, I must admit that the idea of closing myself in a small room while the headphones were cutting me off from the rest of the world, and a narrator voice was telling me about ancient monstrosity coming from the stars, was not super attractive.
The office, so big and empty, has always been full of settling noises coming from the metal structure of the ceiling, caused by the thermal excursions to which they are subjected, but as the emptying of the office progresses in view of the imminent move, these noises seemed to have increased. I remember very well that I told myself not to worry, as during the morning I had seen our managing director, on the other far end of the office, taking care of his business.
I thought that if he was in the office too, no one would be able to come in without him noticing.
So, with this reassuring thoughts in my head, I went in the meeting room to lying down and listening to my audio book.
Today I cannot recall how much time passed before I’ve heard very strange noises going on in the office. Noises of things being moved abruptly and with haste, as if the their owner had no interest at all in the preservation and safety of his own goods.
Regardless of the noise I’ve heard, little by little my eyes began to close. I remember thinking that after all, the noise I heard coming from the adjacent room, the design room, was caused by the managing director preparing the packages for the move, so instead of worrying about the origin and cause of these noises, I dozed off comforted by what I thought was the presence of a known person in my vicinity. I kept listening to the book, and this is how I fell asleep that day, while visions about sinister mansion, dark relics shaped like aliens, ancient parchments, weird languages carved on unknown materials and the furious dance of abominable creatures, occupied my dreams
Around 14:00 pm, the managing director knocked on the door on the conference room to talk with me. After few moments in which we spend ourselves in light chatting, I’ve asked him what he was doing during the lunch break to make all that noise. What he replied to me, froze the blood in my veins. He told me that he left the office around 11:00 am and went back only 5 minutes ago. Of course my head started to wonder who the hell was in the office, doing all that noise during lunch break. I’ve explained him the situation and we did quick check together to see if there was something missing, but everything seemed fine to us (at that time, we forgot to check the design room).
With the consideration that nothing was missing and nothing was broken (no one can enter in the office without the proper badge or the numerical code to open the door) we left each other and went back to our desks to resume our work, thinking that maybe I had misplaced the rumor and noises coming from the building around us or the car workshop below us, for sounds coming from our office. I did not thought about that anymore till, a couple of days later, when I went inside the big design room.
The design room it’s a sort of sacred place for all the designers. It’s quite a big room 15 meters long (50 feet) per 10 meters width (32 feet) beast where the designers, along with other department of the studio, meet and work together on common cross department topics. Its full of papers and concept art hanging on the walls, white boards, constructions made with Lego, toy guns to shoot at gameplay programmers when they do not agree, an hi-fi system, a projectors and many other stuff related to the project. The whole room is surveilled by a camera and nowadays, it remains closed most of the time.
A couple of days after that strange event, I went inside the design room late at night, before leaving the office. It was a Saturday and I was completely alone. I decided, for some reason I’m not aware of, to do a complete check of all the rooms of the office just to be sure that there was nothing out of the ordinary, or at least that all the big windows were closed, in case of sudden rain during the week end. In those days the Design Room its usually closed. To be precise, the design room its closed since 6 months, which is when people started to leave the office to work from home, as per government request. As the design room was and it’s still is one of the most confidential place in the whole Ubisoft Milan, we made sure to not leaving it open.
After quickly checking the general condition of the room and making sure that the windows were closed, I was about to leave when I’ve noticed something strange on the floor: a small drop of what it was looking like blood.
It was with raising bewilderment that I’ve noticed that few meters away from the first drop, there was another one, bigger, and then another one and, not so far from it, an even bigger one of around 5cm (2 inches). I’ve stopped and looked around a bit nervous. I was not expecting at all to see something like that. What could have caused something like that? A pigeon entering from a windows left open by mistake? That was not possible, since they were all perfectly closed. Maybe someone had entered the room and accidentally injured himself? but even this event was not possible, since I’m basically the only one coming to the office lately, and we had only two copies of the design room key. I have one copy of that key in my custody, and the other one we gave it to owners of the cleaning company.
I took my mobile phone with unstable fingers and recorded a clip of the strange trails of blood stains, just to have a proof, and I have sent it to the producer and the managing director, who were quite surprised. We decided that we wanted to know more about it, so we decided to wait for Monday and call someone who could confirm to us if it was blood for real.
I closed the design door and I left the office in a hurry, happy to leave it behind me. It was already quite Dark outside and the office that day was looking too sinister to me. I’ve called the cleaning company and the lady who takes care of our office, to explain to her that she needed to leave the design room alone, that we had things to care of inside and no one had to enter in it, let alone cleaning the floor. I’ve made sure that she understood the instructions clearly. She seemed to acknowledge my strange request without saying much, and closed the conversation a bit too abruptly, which left me puzzled, as usually she has always being such a nice lady. Soon after I took the car and went back home.
Cthulhu is contemporary fashion Icon: it is one of the most famous creations of the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Appears on t-shirts, in "motivational" on Facebook, in films, series and cartoons; he is the protagonist of role-playing games, videogames, card and board games and we can buy soft toys and toys with his appearance ... But are we sure we know him? What do the lyrics of the original stories of the Providence Solitaire tell us about his identity and his role? Let's find out together in this ebook: the attempt to retrace a path full of manipulations, changes and simplifications made over the last eighty years.
When I’ve arrived back on monday, I’ve noticed something weird. Usually I’m arriving in the offie quite early, so I can work without being disturbed for a while, before being pushed into an infinite series of call. I’m arriving so early that normally, the cleaning lady arrive after me. But not that monday. That monday, when I arrived, I’ve noticed that the alarm light was set to green, which means that it was already turned off and that in the studio there was someone.
I walked into the office and greeted the cleaning lady, as I always had, respectfully. She looked at me and said nothing, which I found quite strange. I went back to my desk to search for the Design Room key. I remember that I’ve notice the cleaning lady keep observing me from the very end of the office. I took the key of the design room and went inside, just to check the situation once again, but with great bewilderment I realized that the entire floor of the room had been perfectly washed and there was no trace of the blood stains. I left the design room and walked over to the cleaning lady who kept keeping her eyes on me. I remember being a little angry with the lady when I reminded her that she wasn’t supposed to go into the design room and she wasn’t supposed to clean the floor.
The stare she gave me made me step back a bit. After a long moment of silence, she denied everything.
I looked at her without being able to say anything. Something in her gaze convinced me not to say more. It was the first time that I found it difficult to talk to the cleaning lady, who was usually so available and polite.
The seriousness in her body language did not allow for replies. I went back to my desk feeling confused and helpless. I’ve asked our IT manager to watch the surveillance videos and found nothing relevant or out of the ordinary, just an elderly lady scrubbing a floor. That day the cleaning lady reminded me of Keziah Mason the witch, from the H.P Lovecraft tale, “The dreams in the witch-house”.
Maybe I was wrong maybe I was just suggested by the books I was reading or listening to, maybe those stains on the ground had been caused by some injured pigeon who had somehow found a way to enter In the room and then found an exit. exit. Perhaps the lady had really misunderstood mine instructions, but the fact is that since then I have avoided in every way to be alone in the office in her presence, and I can’t wait to move to the new office.