Most consulting websites begin by asking you to believe a list of adjectives. Strategic. Transformative. Innovative. The words are polished until no human fingerprints remain.
I would rather give you something to do.
The text adventure on this site is a satire about building a venture-backed startup. You navigate coworking spaces, pitch investors, watch your runway, collect questionable advice, and try not to burn out before the company becomes real. It is not a case study disguised as a game. It is not a lead form wearing a funny hat. It is there because games like this mattered to many of us.
The cursor came before the feed
Many of the CEOs and CTOs who find me are close to my age. We remember when a computer did not explain itself with a row of glossy icons. It presented a prompt and waited.
Infocom games, Apple II and DOS adventures, and dial-up bulletin board systems each had their own texture. They shared an important quality: the person at the keyboard had to participate. You typed a command, developed a mental model, received a response, and adjusted.
> EXAMINE MARKET
The market is enormous, according to your deck.
The customers remain unconvinced.
What now?That loop was funny, frustrating, and formative. The interface did not hide the system. It made understanding the system the point.
Nostalgia should do work
Retro design often stops at surface treatment. Add green text, scanlines, a fake boot sequence, and call it a terminal. That produces a costume, not an experience.
The useful part of nostalgia is not the glow. It is the interaction memory. A small vocabulary creates curiosity. Every response reveals a rule. Failure is information. Humor makes repetition tolerable.
The game now starts immediately. The previous version made players sit through a website boot screen, a game boot screen, and an introduction before they could make a decision. Those screens looked the part, but they did not earn the time they consumed.
Every pause in an interface should teach, orient, entertain, or disappear.
The terminal remains. The ceremony does not. Useful commands stay close, help appears without leaving the experience, and the machine is ready when you are.
Startup culture is already an adventure game
The satire works because venture-backed startup life already has the structure of a text adventure.
- You begin with limited resources and incomplete information.
- Characters offer advice that may improve your position or serve their own.
- Ordinary objects acquire absurd strategic importance.
- A confident command can produce an outcome nobody predicted.
- There are many endings, including several that will be described as a success on LinkedIn.
The game exaggerates the language and incentives, but not by much. A good satire only needs to move reality a few inches.
Fun does not need a conversion metric
The game has a business context because it lives on my professional site. That does not make it a funnel.
Its job is to be fun. If you enjoy it, the site has already done something more memorable than displaying another capability matrix. If it reminds you of the first time a remote system answered something you typed, even better.
Professional work benefits from personality. Serious systems are still built by people. Judgment includes knowing when precision matters, when convention is useful, and when a little irreverence produces the more honest result.
The prompt is waiting
You do not need an account. The game does not want your email address. It will not schedule a discovery call after your startup fails.
It will give you a little money, a lot of ambition, and several avoidable mistakes.