List of Molecular Reality Corporation games
This is a list of games made or announced by Molecular Reality Corporation and by demonpore, inc., the name under which it was incorporated in 2018. It runs from a plan of 2013 for a game that would cure all diseases to the browser games the company published in 2026.
In most of the company's games the enemies are made from measurements. In Maxine's Quest each monster can be summoned by a spike in the electric current through a nanopore on the company's laboratory bench, and in Moleculoids each monster is drawn from a real protein structure. The titles announced in 2021 and 2022 were to go further: each player would run real samples through a pore on a home console while playing, and the game would be built from the signals, a practice the company calls experigaming. None of those titles has been released.[1]
Games
| Year | Title | Status | Platform | Enemies or samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | The Game to Cure All Diseases | Not built | None stated | Real experiments, run by millions of players in five modules, according to the founder's unpublished Book of the Church of Sequence Space[2] |
| 2020 or 2021 | Spyke Hunter | Unreleased | Prototype of the demonpore 64 | Spikes in the current made by knots in a nylon filament, pulled through a hole about 2 mm wide[3] |
| 2021 | Bloodstreamer | Dropped | The console (planned) | Blood, "across families and species"[4] |
| 2021 | Backyard Universe | Dropped | The console (planned) | "cells and molecules", viewed in augmented reality[4] |
| 2021 | Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant, first War on the Dragon Tyrant | Planned; one prototype level since May 7, 2026 | Maxine's Quest | Samples bearing the marks of aging, among them "Glycated collagen, telomeres, oxidized cholesterol, foam cells"[5] |
| 2021 | Raindrop Planet | Planned | Maxine's Quest | "GPS-tagged soil, water, and filtered atmosphere samples, disaggregated plant cells, sea monkeys"[5] |
| 2021 | Gastromancy | Planned | Maxine's Quest | "reishi tea, vegetable oil emulsions, dairy emulsions, food coloring dyes"[5] |
| 2021 | Molecules of Mars | Planned | Maxine's Quest | "cyanobacteria, Martian soil simulants"[5] |
| 2021 | SARS Invaders, first 2021: A SARS Odyssey | Planned | Maxine's Quest | Plastic beads and fat particles, with "no real viruses involved in the early phase" |
| 2021 | Genomic Ranger | Planned | Maxine's Quest | About 20 kinds of sample, from "Strawberry and spinach DNA" to "CRISPR-dCas9 complexes on DNA"[5] |
| 2021 | Poop of the Gods | Planned | Maxine's Quest | Feces "From diverse species, irradiated to destroy biohazards in samples we ship"[5] |
| 2021 | Epic Quest Bio, first Epic Quest Biotechnology | Running | EQBio-OS; e-mail, group chats, telephone calls and video meetings | Quests, paid in experience points; the players are the company's staff and volunteers[6] |
| About 2022 | DogeBio | Planned | Maxine's Quest | "Dog biosamples, rapamycin metabolites, dog food"[5] |
| 2024 | Tileworld | Planned | The members' web platform | A world of tiles for members' avatars[2] |
| 2025 | The Disclosure Crawl | Online since 2026 | Web browser, eight linked pages | Objections to the company's science and plans, defeated by multiple-choice answers; the last, Irrationalis, has 300 hit points |
| 2026 | Nanopore Physics Studio | Online; version 2.0 dated February 2026 | Web browser | Simulated ions and one of four molecules, injected by the user |
| 2026 | Nanopore Studio | Online to members since April 16, 2026 | EQBio-OS | Molecules the player releases into a simulated pore; a tutorial of 43 lessons ends with a badge |
| 2026 | JeoPOREdy! | Online to members | EQBio-OS | 138 science clues read aloud by Keltar, ten seconds per answer |
| 2026 | Maxine's Quest | Online since May 7, 2026; version 2 May 19 | Web browser | Clay mushrooms; in Live Signal mode each is summoned by a spike in the current through the pore on the company's bench[7] |
| 2026 | Moleculoids | Online | Web and mobile browsers | Real protein structures from the Protein Data Bank, in eight families from Enzyme to Antibody[8] |
| 2026 | Pac-Protein, Molecular Invaders, Centipeptide, Ribo-Runner and Crispr Command | "Coming Soon" | MoleculArcade | Substrates and inhibitors, viral particles, a polypeptide chain, misfolded proteins and viral DNA, according to the menu |
| 2026 | Music Box of Life | Dormant since June 2026 | Web browser | Creatures born from recorded sounds, sorted into eight phyla from drone to glitch |
| 2026 | The Labyrinth | Online, unlinked | Web browser | Two minotaurs, which chase the player 35 percent of the time and wander the rest |
| 2026 | Universe Window | Online since July 2026 | Web browser with a webcam | In its fourth world, real protein structures floating in a cell 80 m in radius, which the visitor can shoot to identify |
| 2026 | Silver Orange | Online since July 22, 2026 | Web browser | About twenty "entities" that drift, talk, form committees and issue citations to one another; no molecules[9] |
Influences
The titles of 2021 and 2022 were described through older games. The memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest names its influences for each title, and every video game it names was released between 1977 and 1985, the years of the Atari 2600 and the arcade boom, with the exception of FarmVille.[5] Molecules of Mars was summed up as "Moon Patrol meets Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy" and Poop of the Gods as "Tempest meets Qbert but with giant alien space-gods who poop". The console they were written for had, in the company's words, "the general appearance and footprint of a classic 1980s gaming console".[1]
Other titles are puns. Spyke Hunter, the first game the company coded, was named for the arcade game Spy Hunter; its author, Kent Kemmish, later called it "the unfortunately named 'Spyke Hunter'" and added, "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?"[3] The name of JeoPOREdy!, the company's quiz, comes from the television quiz Jeopardy!, and the Disclosure Crawl's full title, Dungeons & Diligence, after Dungeons & Dragons. Moleculoids is introduced on its menu card as "a molecular take on the classic Asteroids"; the game behind the card is a dungeon crawler.[8]
Two titles came from outside games. Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant takes its dragon from the philosopher Bostrom's fable of 2005, in which the dragon stands for aging.[10] DogeBio was "Inspired by: An actual game of fetch with our Chief Quadruped Officer, who was named 'Doge' IRL years before the coin was a thing."[5]
Reception
People who signed up after the 2021 advertisement were asked which game they would choose. In a sample of 135 answers, "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!", the second name of the aging game, received 26 votes, Raindrop Planet 25, 2021: A SARS Odyssey 23, Genomic Ranger 18, Poop of the Gods 16, Molecules of Mars 14 and Gastromancy 13.[2] The SARS game was renamed because, in the company's words, "we didn't ship in 2021 and had to change the name!"[11]
See also
References
- ^ a b "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ a b c "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b "We're on an epic quest (advertisement)". Molecular Reality Corporation.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ Kemmishtree (2025). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.
- ^ Pixel Marchetti (June 2, 2026). "Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes". Ludicious.
- ^ a b Pixel Marchetti (July 14, 2026). "Moleculoids Review: An Asteroids Game That Turned Into a Dungeon". Ludicious.
- ^ Pixel Marchetti (September 10, 2026). "Silver Orange Review: Please Do Not Interact With Regional". Ludicious.
- ^ Bostrom, N. (2005). "The fable of the dragon-tyrant". Journal of Medical Ethics 31 (5): 273-277. doi:10.1136/jme.2004.009035.
- ^ "Molecular Reality Corporation". Molecular Reality Corporation. February 2026.