Molecules of Mars
| Molecules of Mars | |
|---|---|
 The memo's illustration: a rover on large treaded wheels crossing rough ground, with a red flower and two seedlings in front of it | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Platform(s) | Maxine's Quest (planned) |
| Release | Unreleased |
| Genre(s) | Astrobiology |
Molecules of Mars is a planned game about astrobiology by Molecular Reality Corporation, one of eight titles described in the 2022 memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". The memo sums it up as "Moon Patrol meets Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy", and gives its samples as "cyanobacteria, Martian soil simulants".[1] Players would have run those samples through a nanopore on the company's console, and the game would have been drawn from the signals. It had not been released by October 2026.
Description
The game first appeared in the company's 2021 advertisement "We're on an epic quest", where its line reads "explore possibilities & prospects for Martian life using realistic mimics of Martian soil".[2] The memo filed it under "Science: astrobiology", the study of life beyond Earth and of the conditions it would need. Its illustration, drawn in black ink with touches of red like the others in the memo, shows a heavily equipped vehicle on large treaded wheels, and in front of it a red flower growing out of bare ground.[1]
Influences
Moon Patrol is an arcade game released by Irem in 1982. The player drives a moon buggy from left to right across the lunar surface. The buggy jumps craters and boulders while firing at attackers overhead, and the mountains behind it scroll more slowly than the hills in front of them. Moon Patrol was among the first games to use that layered effect, called parallax scrolling.
The other half of the formula is the Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996). The novels follow the settlement of Mars over about two centuries, during which the settlers thicken its air and warm its ground with engineered organisms and orbiting mirrors. Those who want the planet changed are called Greens. Those who want it left as it was are Reds. The company took the side of the Greens. Its 2022 paper "Our North Star" lists, among the uses of synthetic biology, the hope "to terraform Mars!"[3] A Japanese-language description of the game written in 2025 named terraforming among its aims as well.[4]
Samples
Cyanobacteria are bacteria that photosynthesize as plants do. They split water and release oxygen. Their oxygen began to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago, and for that reason they are the usual candidates in proposals to make oxygen and food from Martian materials.
Martian soil simulants are terrestrial materials prepared to resemble the loose surface material, or regolith, of Mars, so that equipment and growing methods can be tried on Earth. An early standard, JSC Mars-1, was weathered volcanic ash from Hawaii. A later one, MGS-1, is mixed from individual minerals in the proportions that the Curiosity rover measured in a windblown deposit in Gale Crater called Rocknest.[5] A player of Molecules of Mars would have watched particles of such a mixture, and the bacteria grown on it, pass one at a time through a hole in the console's cartridge.
Later mentions
The game is cited in The Disclosure Crawl, a text dungeon about the company's science drafted in 2025. Beside a 2024 news report on "mirror" microbes built from molecules of the opposite handedness, its commentary argues that a nanopore able to sequence such molecules "becomes crucial for studying engineered biosystems and for true astrobiological sensing (via the 'Molecules of Mars' game!)".[6]
Reception
In a sample of 135 answers to the 2021 sign-up form's question about which early game a new member would choose, "Molecules of Mars" received 14 votes, sixth of the seven titles offered. Only "Gastromancy", with 13, received fewer.[4]
See also
References
- ^ a b "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ "Our North Star: Utility-Scale Molecular Sensing". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "Mars global simulant MGS-1: A Rocknest-based open standard for basaltic martian regolith simulants". Icarus 317: 470-478. 2019.
- ^ "D&D: Disclosure Crawl". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2025.