Developer Phigames

Publisher Dear Villagers

Format PC

Origin UK

Release 2020

Blacks and reds coagulate into a trash polka conglomerate of data. You, The Program, are a virus injected into a computer to end the post-apocalyptic war raging outside the machine, and begin as the most basic version of yourself: an orange blur of perpetually recompiling code, destined to manipulate the otherwise intangible by platforming your way through the anomalous spheres of the Mainframe.

designer tells us that this unique world was born from memories of childhood curiosity. “Growing up, my dad always encouraged me to mess around with computers,” he explains. “Kept me off the streets, I guess.” By age 11, Dinh had developed a keen interest in games and had taught himself MS-DOS commands and basic programming. Around this time he also began engaging with the texts that would eventually inspire , becoming fascinated by the books of Iain M Banks, which introduced him to the symbiotic relationship between humanity and AI, and ’80s science fiction films such as Tron, which instigated his pondering about “what it might look like inside a computerised fictional virtual world.”