List of unrealized Molecular Reality Corporation projects
This is a list of projects that Molecular Reality Corporation and its predecessor, demonpore, inc., announced or planned and did not carry out, from a 2013 plan for a video game that would cure all diseases to a mint-chocolate-scented item promised for March 2026. Products and sites that the company built, ran and later switched off are listed separately in Retired products of Molecular Reality.
Most entries come from four documents: the 2021 advertisement "We're on an epic quest", the 2022 memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest", the company's December 2022 technical overview and The Disclosure Crawl, a text dungeon about its science drafted in 2025. Several plans changed shape before they ended, and a few are still promised.
List
| Year | Project | Kind | Plan | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | The Game to Cure All Diseases | Video game | In the founder's unpublished Book of the Church of Sequence Space, a game in five modules in which millions of players would run real experiments, with cures sold as cheap pills made by "the cheapest forms of biomolecular printing, such as nucleic acid polymer synthesis"; the aim was to cure all diseases within the 2010s[1] | Not built. In July 2025 the phrase returned as a caption on the company's homepage, "A Game to Cure All Diseases". |
| 2020 | CoronaPore | Instrument | An early launch of the Molecular Aquarium, a chip of many sliding pores, in response to COVID-19[2] | Pore arrays were made but not tested; in 2026 they sat on the founder's desk "as museum pieces".[1] |
| 2021 | demonpore 64 | Game console | "the world's first Molecular Gaming Console™", called the demonpore 2600 in one version of its advertisement | Never sold. "We should have shipped in a form very close to the one seen, very early on. But we didn't."[3] |
| 2021 | Bloodstreamer | Game | "the game of real-time blood biology across families and species"[4] | Dropped after the advertisement. |
| 2021 | Backyard Universe | Augmented-reality game | "go out and find cells and molecules and view them in Augmented Reality"[4] | Dropped; its line later went to Raindrop Planet. |
| 2021 | Early game titles: SARS Invaders, Molecules of Mars, Raindrop Planet, Gastromancy, Genomic Ranger, DogeBio, Poop of the Gods | Games | "a new bio-field-specific title every month", each played on the instrument software Maxine's Quest with real samples[5] | None released. An eighth, Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant, exists as a prototype level of Maxine's Quest. |
| 2021 | MoliGotchi | Game | "adopt a complex and unique microbial civilization within a teardrop-sized vessel"[1] | Appears only on versions of the advertisement. |
| 2021 | Burnerphone | Instrument | A compact unit for making pores by controlled dielectric breakdown | Withdrawn from commercial plans because of existing intellectual property on the method.[1] |
| 2022 | Promotional comic book | Publication | A comic "we're developing", of which one panel was printed: hands on a gamepad bearing the demon logo, Earth in the sky, and the words "BIOLOGY IS JUST A GAME WE PLAY TOGETHER"[6] | Not published. |
| 2022 | Leaderboard authorship | Publication | Results posted to the preprint server bioRxiv "with author order corresponding to the leaderboard for top experimentalist-gamers for a given experimental campaign"[4] | No such paper has appeared. |
| 2022 | Battle royale | Game mode | "Games will be solo player, player vs. player, and battle-royale mode a la Fortnite."[4] | The 2026 Maxine's Quest is for one player. |
| 2022 | Nanopore printing | Pore fabrication | Pores made inside each cartridge by electrical discharge, graphene pores in particular[4] | Replaced by pores made centrally on wafers. |
| 2022 | Home laboratory kit | Accessories | "cheap USB microscopes", "pH strips and microbalances" shipped to players for "correlative analysis at home with the samples that they source locally"[4] | Not shipped. |
| 2022 | Sorting in the cartridge | Accessories | "different methods of on-cartridge analyte pre-sorting", among them miniaturized gel electrophoresis, to be tested "with quarterly shipments to our players"[4] | Not shipped. |
| 2022 | Molecular PC | Instrument | A second-generation device "marketed more as a 'molecular PC' than a gaming console"[4] | Not built. |
| 2022 | $99 Molecular Aquarium | Toy | A "MOLECULAR AQUARIUM®" sold in the style of the Sea-Monkeys advertisements, with a "nanoselector knob"[4] | "I don't think we'll have 'molecular aquariums' for sale this decade at your local neighborhood Target store."[3] |
| 2024 | Tileworld | Game world | A world of tiles for members' avatars on the web platform of the Molecular Streaming Corps[1] | Work on the platform restarted without it at the end of September 2024. The company's 2026 tour still says: "When we deploy the tileworld, your avatar will get a lot more interesting".[7] |
| 2024 | MR1 Molecular Streaming Device | Instrument | A handheld reader for $300[8] | Not shipped. In October 2026 the name MR1 passed to the open MR1 Nanopore Reader. |
| 2025 | Expanded character classes | Game design | Classes with mentors who are not players, among them Biopunk, Anti-deathist, Gaian, Sequence Space Explorer, Substrate Sentinel and Ludic Engineer[9] | The game's header shows nine classes.[1] |
| 2025 | Journal of the Epic Quest | Publication | An open journal of the game's results[9] | Not started. |
| 2025 | Disclosure mini-games | Games | "Particle Herder, Pore Plumber Panic, Sliding Shapes Synchronicity, Analyte Paddleball, Signal Seeker Safari", to teach the company's science[9] | Not released. |
| 2025 | "The MMORPG Where Death is the Final Boss (And We're Speedrunning It)" | Website | A long comic draft for the site of Epic Quest Bio, written in August 2025[1] | Not published. |
| 2026 | Keltar-fresh | Provision | An item that "costs us a few cents to make, smells like mint chocolate", with "ETA: March 2026"[1] | The estimate was unchanged in October 2026. |
| 2026 | Coming-soon arcade games | Games | Pac-Protein, Molecular Invaders, Centipeptide, Crispr Command and Ribo-Runner on the hub of MoleculArcade[1] | Still listed as coming soon. |
Patterns
Games outnumber instruments. In 2021 the sign-up form asked new members to choose among seven early titles. In a sample of 135 answers the winner was "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!", with 26 votes, ahead of Raindrop Planet with 25 and 2021: A SARS Odyssey with 23.[1] The winner is the only one of the seven to have reached a prototype: as Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant it is level 7 of Maxine's Quest, which consists of a single wall placed outside the arena.
Of the titles the company announced between 2021 and 2026, one became a prototype level and one, Moleculoids, shipped as a different game from the one its hub describes. The December 2022 overview supplies more entries than any other document.
Several projects ended by being folded into others. The augmented reality of Backyard Universe moved to Raindrop Planet; the in-cartridge pores of nanopore printing moved to the Burnerphone and then to a central wafer process; and the early game titles became, in the founder's words of 2026, "only intended aesthetically/ludologically as 'wrappers'" for Maxine's Quest, which "won't necessarily be shipped with any specific cadence".[10] See Universe wrapper.
The company has kept some promises open. A card in its list of provisions for members reads "Yes, we are going to make the original console form factor for our electronics!" and, further down, "Sorry for the five years it will have taken."[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "(no subject)". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ "Our North Star: Utility-Scale Molecular Sensing". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ "EQBio-OS tour". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
- ^ Ferris Calloway (October 23, 2026). "There Are Two MR1s and That Is Fine". Debye Length.
- ^ a b c "D&D: Disclosure Crawl". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2025.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "platform". EQBio-OS.