Silicon Life: From Bedroom to Billion

“September 1981. A bedroom, a PC, a dream.”

You're twenty, with a workbench squeezed between the bed and the bookcase, and a few classified ads in the paper. The neighbours bring you their broken PCs; others order a new one. Buy the parts, put them together by hand, switch on: the boot beep, the green screen… and the first customer pays. That's how an empire starts.

Build, repair, sell for more

The workbench is in 3D and everything is done with the mouse: click a part and it snaps into place. A PC “won't start any more”? Switch it on and listen to the beeps, put the suspect parts on the tester, try a known-good swap: think it through and you'll find the fault in a few clicks.

• Six compatibility rules, always on screen: CPU and motherboard, memory, case size, graphics slot, power supply, cooling.
  
• Save a successful PC as a model, and your company builds it in series.
  
• Take back old PCs, strip them down, and their used parts go into new machines.
  
• Customers with a personality, wishes and a budget, who rate your work in stars.

Forty-four years of PC history

More than 600 components follow the real timeline of hardware, from 5.25" floppies to today's graphics cards, under parodied names: Untel and ADM processors, Envidia GeFarce and 3dfox Vaudou cards, the MS-DODO system, Macrosoft's Fenêtres 95. The big events land on their real dates: the Minitel, the release of Doum, Internet for everyone, the year 2000 bug, the dot-com crash, the 2008 crisis, the chip shortage. Every era changes your customers, your prices and your sales channels, and your in-house software reboots with every decade.

From the bedroom to the group's headquarters

The bedroom, then the garage, the shop where customers walk in from the high street, the shipping warehouse, the factory and its assembly line, and at last the tower in the business district. Six premises in 3D in Vanzanal, a whole town on its island, with its passers-by, its trains, its boats and its seasons. Hire technicians, sellers and team leaders: as you grow, your team takes over, and the custom builds stay yours.

Aim for a billion before the end of 2025

Six chapters of goals, seven ranks from Tinkerer to Billionaire, and your character ages with you, from 20 to 64. Challenges, tenders, fleet contracts, letters with a choice: every game is different. But mind the bank: a loan you can no longer repay means seizure… and, if you're already back in the bedroom, jail.

Silicon Life can be played in English and French, with the mouse.