What's next
A net LARP.
NETGODZ is the first thing out of this world, not the whole of it. The larger thing is a hacker role-playing game played across the real web: corporate factions attacking and defending their own take on the internet, from browsers that function as actual cyberdecks, in a net with thirteen versions of itself that players move through.
NOTHING HERE IS ANNOUNCED. No date, no platform commitment, no signup, no pre-order, no list. This page describes where the work is pointed, which is not the same as a promise about what will ship. Anything on it may change shape entirely or never be built, and none of it is a reason to give anybody money or an email address — not least because there is nowhere on any of these six sites to do either.
The idea
Fiction and reality, past and present and future, in one game.
That is the whole ambition, and it is worth saying in plain words because it is easy to mistake for a marketing conceit. Three things are being deliberately blended:
- Fiction and reality
The invented companies already have real websites, at real domains, with real product pages you can read today from a browser you already own. The game does not describe the world to you in a codex; it points you at it and lets you read. The seam between a page that is part of a game and a page that is just a page is exactly where this thing lives.
- Past and present
The history inside the game maps onto the history of computing — the same order, the same constraints, the same arguments about memory and bandwidth and who owns the wire. Playing an early era is not nostalgia decor. It is playing a net that genuinely could not do the things a later one can.
- And future
The eras keep going past the one we are standing in. Walking forward through them is walking out of the net's documented past into a version of it nobody has had to operate yet.
The deck
A browser that is a cyberdeck.
The intent is downloadable Chromium-based browsers that function as decks rather than emulating one: desktop and mobile, the same browser you would otherwise use to read a spec sheet, fitted with the instruments of the fiction.
Which makes the interface honest. In a world where the net is hardware in a building, the thing you jack in with should be a real piece of software with real limits, not a window inside a window pretending to be one.
The web, and the net, in one pane
The in-world sites are ordinary web pages. A deck that is a browser can hold both the fiction and the open web without a loading screen between them, which is the only way the blend works at all.
Two form factors, one net
Sitting at a desk and standing in a queue are different kinds of presence in a world where being reachable is the risk. Both are intended to be real places to play from.
The factions
Everyone is building their own internet, and defending it.
The companies are not a backdrop in this version, they are sides. Each one has its own idea of what the net should be — craft or benchmarks, openness or throughput, a gallery or a warehouse — and each one builds the net it believes in and then has to hold it.
Players take a side, run for it, and take ground from the others. Territory is the game's own net: the in-world properties, the racks behind them, and whatever players have raised themselves. Nothing in this points at a real third-party website, and nothing in it teaches or enables anything that works against a real computer system — the arithmetic is the game's, the targets are the game's, and that is a design rule rather than a disclaimer.
The eras, promoted
Thirteen versions of the net — and you can only see your own.
In the mini game an era is a renderer. Here it becomes something much more interesting: a version of the net you inhabit, and you can only see and attack other players standing in the same one.
Progress moves you forward through the versions. That is a real trade rather than a reward, because moving forward changes who can reach you and who you can no longer find. An era is a neighbourhood with its own population, its own economy, and its own ceiling on what is technically possible in it.
A teletype net and a lit 3D net are the same net at two points in its life, running at the same time, occupied by different people who cannot see each other. That is the structural idea the whole thing is built around, and it is why the thirteen eras were worth building before anything else was.
Where it stands
Honestly: it is a direction, not a product.
The thing being built right now is NETGODZ, the single-player mini game, and that is also unfinished and undated. Everything on this page sits behind it.
There is no announcement to be part of. If you want to be in this world before any of it exists, the world is already open: five companies, five websites, in character and sitting there being ordinary.