NetGodz · a single-player hacking-sim roguelike
Break in, take the data,
and leave before you're traced.
A message from E. Starlight: hello. Are you receiving this? Look, I don't have a lot of time. Your references look good. This will be profitable for the both of us. You reply: what should I call you? She answers: call me Starlight. Are you ready?
Coming to iOS and Android. Play NetGodz RUN in your browser today.
1997 · a second line
An employer you have never met wants you on the team.
The message is signed Starlight. Nobody you know has seen an office or a face, only the jobs, and the runners who take them move up fast. The line dropped on the teletype in 1969. Nearly thirty years on, the same offer arrives over a modem.
Dialling STARLIGHT NODE 7…
STARLIGHT NODE 7 · 555-0147
Thirteen versions of the net
Play through sixty years of the net.
The game opens on a 1969 teletype. As the story unfolds you play forward through each era of the technology behind it: phosphor terminals, vector screens, grey desktops, polygons, and on to 2029. Each campaign you finish moves the story and the machine on a generation, and the rules you learned on the teletype hold to the end.
Starlightonline
Underneath
A world built deep enough to leave clues.
NetGodz is set in a world with sixty years of its own history, and parts of it live outside the game. Five of its companies keep real websites you can visit today, with catalogues, benchmark tables, job listings and archives that go back decades. They are written as if the world were real, and read closely, they hold pieces of the deeper story.
Underneath it all, the net is hardware in leased cages. Each building has a meter, a cooling bill and a front desk that buzzes the courier in, and the racks inside are owned in pieces by companies that file tax returns. There is never enough capacity, routing or floor space to go round, so the owners compete for it with leases, contracts, procurement rounds, and now and then a job nobody writes into a contract.
Six of those hops have a mailing address and a website you can read. Nobody has found an address for the seventh.
What is actually being fought over
Three things, all of them physical.
Compute, memory, and the power to run both
Memory is the scarce resource in every deck ever built, and it is scarce in the buildings too. There is no spare capacity to buy, only capacity somebody else is already using.
Whose wire your traffic crosses
Most routes are carried by a rival at an agreed rate, so a competitor can see exactly how much traffic you send, and when.
A rack in the right building
A worse rack two floors from the exchange beats a better one across town. Distance costs milliseconds, and every contract puts a price on them.
All three are bought and sold through procurement. A contract can cover almost anything except the part somebody has to do in person. That part gets hired out, and in this game it is your job.
The part that involves you
Be a runner.
A runner is a contractor with a deck. Somebody with a budget wants something that is inside somebody else's building and is not going to go themselves, so they hire out the trip. You take one job, fit a deck that never has enough memory, and try to get out under your own power before anybody works out who was in there.
The first decision is whose deck you run.
Cybrscape
Founded on repair, grew into manufacture, and still prouder of its service department than of its product line. Decks are numbered in Marks, I through V, and every spec sheet admits that memory is the bottleneck.
- Will deal with one person who owns one deck.
- Quotes in credits at the works. The deck is run for four hours against the mark's test card, and the signed card ships with it.
- Thirty-six months of warranty from the date on that card, transferable with the deck.
- Publishes its service turnaround monthly, including the months it missed.
Nitrosoft
Younger, louder, and shipping a new generation faster than most people finish paying for the last one. Claims to waste less of the same memory than anybody else, and publishes the test harness so you can go and check.
- Sells through a yard's supply desk, against a deck code and a quantity.
- Credits settle on the yard account, and they say so up front.
- Benchmarks everything, and states the ceiling on its own headline number.
- Slower to answer the phone, and their support page says exactly how much slower.
Neither site has a checkout. Everything on them is priced in credits, which are earned in the game and cannot be bought. Choosing a deck means reading two catalogues that disagree and deciding which company you'd trust with the only machine you own. It takes about ten minutes.
The world
Five of these companies have websites you can visit.
Each one is written in character, with product pages, spec sheets, price lists and job listings. The exception is the terms and privacy pages, whose first sentence says the company is fictional and part of this game.
Started in 2011 as a two-bench repair shop and built its first whole deck in 2018. Five Marks of deck, I to V, and every spec sheet says plainly that memory is the bottleneck.
Founded in 2026 and sells one line, the NX, to yards rather than to individuals. Publishes a benchmark for everything, names Cybrscape in its comparisons, and is slower to answer the phone.
A non-profit filed in 2000. It pays for instruments that fly on other people's spacecraft and publishes every result, failures included. No inspector has yet finished reading one of its manifests.
Racks, routing and colocation. Incorporated in 1979 as a conduit company, it owns 41,880 route-km of fibre outright and is the oldest of the five. It is hiring.
The game being built in it
NETGODZ, a single-player hacking-sim roguelike.
You take one job at a time with one deck. A raid is one target, and a run is the chain of raids until you bank it or die holding it. Every action has a chance of getting you discovered, so good runs use fewer, better-chosen moves.
The picture runs through thirteen graphics eras, from a teletype printing in dashes to what 1984 would have called photoreal, and moves on one era each time you finish a campaign.
- In development
- iOS
- Android
- Single player
PLAYABLE NOW, IN A BROWSER. NetGodz RUN is the lite build, live at run.netgodz.com. The full game is in development for iOS and Android, and the world around it is up and can be read today.
- 00ASCII
- 01Terminal
- 02Terminal II
- 03Vector
- 04Vector II
- 05Raster
- 06Raster II
- 07Raster III
- 08Raster IV
- 093D
- 103D II
- 11Modern 3D
- 12Photoreal
Thirteen eras, drawn in CSS as impressions of their chrome. Scroll it sideways.
What's next
Later: a hacker role-playing game played across the real web.
The mini game comes first. The larger plan is a net LARP: corporate factions attacking and defending their own take on the internet, played through downloadable browsers that function as actual cyberdecks, on desktop and in your hand. The thirteen eras become versions of the net, and you see and attack the people standing in the same era as you.
The invented companies already have websites you can read, and the eras follow the real history of computing in order, so moving between eras means moving through the net's own past.
