The Murder Cake Mystery

Now that I am no longer at Epic Games, I can finally go back to writing my opinions about things other than camera gear. I have a backlog of topics I would love to talk about, from free-to-play monetization to data interpretation to the infamous metaverse race.

But first, I’d love to start with something less serious to see if this account still works. You might have seen this story already on my BlueSky or Twitter. so — my apologies.

The Murder Cake Mystery

It was an average Friday, the 13th. The Epic Games Store team was busy shipping Borderlands 3, which turned out to be one of the year’s biggest games, amidst very vocal criticism and even threats from concerned gamers.

Right around lunch, a person from the reception desk delivered a gift for the store team that became suspicious the more we looked at it — a cake.

It had no card. It wasn’t addressed to anyone, not even the store team — just to Epic. It was anonymous. It had the text “Congrats on the Boarderlands 3 Release!”. That’s right, “Boarderlands”, in a font clearly not approved by anyone even remotely related to Borderlands 3. Also, “Congrats”.

It reminded me of a Ukrainian funeral cake.

We ran downstairs to catch the delivery person. He just shrugged — it was from a bakery, and he had no idea who ordered it. Our BizDev team pinged folks at Take-Two — they haven’t heard anything about the cake and were very busy working on the game’s launch, thank you.

Our contact at Gearbox said the same thing but with more passion.

We joked about calling the police or the bomb squad. We looked at each other — smiling but visibly unsettled. Everyone was hungry, and the cake looked delicious. It was so moist you could feel it even without cutting a piece. Its smell was magnificent.

I decided that I was trying to lose weight. A person beside me chuckled nervously and told everyone they were not hungry. Someone threw around the Murder Cake moniker, and it stuck.

People from other rooms that were less critical to our company’s survival were invited for the launch celebration and cake, but upon hearing its story, turned out not to be very hungry either. A surprising number of them were dieting, too.

Time passed. We tried to keep working without glancing at the cake as it sat in the middle of the room. Everything smelled like chocolate and vanilla.

Two hours in, Chris Donahue, Take-Two’s account manager and the team’s most experienced biz dev person, stood up, a knife in his hand. “Tell my family I love them,” he quipped as he cut a piece and quickly ate it. We had no time to stop him.

No one followed his example. We asked if his decision was motivated by smell, and he said it was, but we knew he was taking one for the team. So we watched him for another hour.

As Chris wasn’t dying, he was getting increasingly relaxed, and we joked about the whole ordeal, coming up with theories about who could have sent us this abomination. Everyone laughed about the stupid thing, but no one else took a bite.

Two more hours later, we decided it was too late to save Chris, and we might as well follow him, so we all ate the damn cake.

It was delicious.