The year is 1980. You’re the disgraced heir to a bankrupt arcade empire, handed a dusty garage and a prototype console rejected by every major publisher. But Silicon Valley’s golden age hides cutthroat rivalries: industrial spies steal blueprints, black-market cartridges flood markets, and a shadowy conglomerate sabotages indie innovators. From cobbling together 8-bit guts in your garage to dominating the VR wars of the 2020s, every decision reshapes gaming history. Will you partner with renegade coders to revolutionize online play, or sell out to corporate titans for quick cash? One misstep, and your legacy becomes a footnote—or a cautionary tale etched into ROM chips.
Gameplay Mechanics
1. Tech Tree Time Capsules – Unlock era-specific innovations (e.g., 1990s CD-ROM load times) through risky R&D, but obsolescence looms—cling too long to cartridges, and rivals bury you with disc-based consoles.
2. Espionage Risk Management – Plant false specs in rival databases or hire hackers to delay competitors’ launches, balancing ethics against stock prices.
3. Nostalgia Engine – Remaster vintage consoles during later eras (e.g., 2010s retro-wave craze) to exploit Gen X nostalgia, but adapt hardware for modern HDMI/cloud specs.
Key Features
1. Corporate War Chronicles – Navigate real-world events: dodge the 1983 crash by pivoting to home computers, exploit Y2K panic to market "millennium-proof" handhelds, or bet big on motion controls during the Wii boom.
2. Adaptive AI Rivals – Competing CEOs evolve strategies: a 90s-era foe might clone your design and undercut prices, while 2020s adversaries flood social media with smear campaigns.
3. Unionization Dilemmas – Staff demands escalate across decades—crunch-time mandates boost productivity but trigger strikes, while automation risks PR nightmares ("Heartless Corp Replaces Devs with Robots!").
Insider Strategies
1. Betray the Timeline – Secretly develop Wi-Fi capabilities in the 80s by diverting R&D funds from planned projects, risking bankruptcy for a decade head start.
2. Fake Leaks, Real Profits – "Accidentally" leak a flawed console design to misdirect rivals, then launch the polished version weeks earlier.
3. Embrace Flops – Let failed products (e.g., a 2000s VR headset) linger in warehouses; relaunch them years later as "ahead-of-its-time cult classics" with hipster marketing.
Preview: