The eras

Thirteen renderers. One game underneath.

A campaign is twenty-eight targets, played end to end in a single consistent look. Clear it and the next campaign runs on a better machine. The renderer only ever moves in the gap between campaigns — a playthrough is an era, and nothing is ever going to change the picture out from under you mid-raid.

Why it matters

The upgrade is the plot, not the packaging.

This is the part worth being clear about, because it is easy to mistake for a cosmetic reward ladder. It is not one.

When you finish a campaign, you do not get a nicer skin for the next one. You get re-run. The next pass renders at the highest fidelity the compute on the other end of the line can now support — and it can support more because of what you spent the last campaign doing. The picture improves because the antagonist is getting richer, and the antagonist is getting richer because of you.

Which means the ladder reads backwards from how it looks. Era zero is not a limitation you are escaping. Era twelve is not an achievement. It is a measure of how much has been taken while you were busy earning it.

The vibe is the constant; only the renderer moves. Gibson and Stephenson hold at every era. The ground stays near-black, the accent stays warm amber, and the language stays clipped and commercial whether it is printing on paper or rendering in a lit 3D scene.

All thirteen

Teletype to photoreal.

Vector comes before raster, which is also the true order: Battlezone is 1980 and Windows 3.0 is 1990, so a vector tube really does predate the grey GUI. The swatches below are impressions of each era's chrome, drawn in CSS.

Era 00

ASCII

A teletype. One colour on paper, rules made of dashes, bars made of hashes, icons three characters wide. Not a glass terminal — a glass terminal is already a luxury.

Where you start

Era 01

Terminal

The glass teletype. Monospace, no colour past the amber, and nothing on screen that a serial line could not have sent.

Campaign 1 cleared

Era 02

Terminal II

Amber phosphor with the tube included: scanlines, bloom, and a barrel vignette pulling the corners in.

Campaign 2 cleared

Era 03

Vector

Battlezone. No fills anywhere — a beam draws lines and that is the entire vocabulary. Vector genuinely predates the grey GUI that follows it.

Campaign 3 cleared

Era 04

Vector II

The beam learns to fill. Flat-shaded polygons, still glowing, still lit from nowhere in particular.

Campaign 4 cleared

Era 05

Raster

Early Windows. Grey chrome, one-step bevels, black text on #C0C0C0. The raster eras are operating systems, not palettes.

Campaign 5 cleared

Era 06

Raster II

Windows 95. Teal desktop, two-step bevels, gradient title bars. More icons, less text — everyone recognises this one instantly.

Campaign 6 cleared

Era 07

Raster III

Snow Leopard. Brushed metal, pinstripes, glossy buttons and soft drop shadows, from the years when software wanted to look like an appliance.

Campaign 7 cleared

Era 08

Raster IV

Modern macOS. Frosted vibrancy, hairline borders, generous radii, dark by default. The era that thinks it has stopped having a style.

Campaign 8 cleared

Era 09

3D

A perspective grid floor and flat faces standing on it, with the affine wobble of a console that could not afford to correct for it.

Campaign 9 cleared

Era 10

3D II

The same geometry, textured. A specular sweep across the surfaces and depth fog swallowing the back of the grid.

Campaign 10 cleared

Era 11

Modern 3D

A cyan grid and light ribbons — the net drawn as the inside of a machine, lit from within.

Campaign 11 cleared

Era 12

Photoreal

The same world, lit red. Not "modern" — this is what 1984 imagined photoreal would look like, and it should read like the cover of a paperback rather than a tech demo.

Campaign 12 cleared

Three rules that make it work

An era is a setting, not a state of progress.

Eras unlock, never replace
Reaching Vector adds Vector to a menu that still contains ASCII, Terminal and Terminal II. If you want to play all twenty-eight targets on the glass teletype forever, that is a supported way to play the game and not a downgrade you are being nudged out of.
Era zero is the compatibility floor
Every mechanic must stay fully legible in dashes and hashes. No piece of information is ever allowed to exist only in a later era's art — which is a real constraint on the design and the reason the ASCII era is not a novelty mode.
Each era fails the way its machines failed
Losing a run looks like the generation you are losing it in. A teletype does not crash the way Windows 95 crashes, and neither of them crashes the way a lit 3D scene falls apart.

Finishing a campaign ends the run, deliberately. Clearing the final target banks the score and stops, rather than swapping the renderer out halfway through a chain. It also means winning gets an actual screen instead of slipping past as one more debrief.

How the game plays The five websites