We test every new model
by making it build a game.

The straight-up Oregon Trail: no space, no foraging twist. Buy oxen and rations, travel west, hunt to keep the party fed, and ford or ferry the rivers.

Rendered as a CRT phosphor terminal (TRAILTRON · MODEL 1848-II), complete with a boot sequence, scanlines, vignette, and a bezel that links back to empowered.guru.

The foraging system is the whole game here: a field guide of edible and deadly plants with biomes, seasons, and honest toxicity, so telling wild onion from death camas is a survival mechanic, not a trivia quiz.

Pace, rations, river crossings, and illness fill out the classic Oregon Trail bones underneath. A quieter, more thoughtful take: your party lives or dies by what you can correctly identify.

An earlier, tighter colony-ship take on the Oregon Trail: fuel burns daily, food feeds the crew, hull keeps the vacuum out, and morale decides whether the colony mutinies or thrives. At every fork, choose: every choice has a cost and a risk.

Built mobile-first with a canvas starfield and synthesized audio: nothing to download, just open and go. Each lost colonist lands on the memorial wall.

The Oregon Trail formula rewired for molasses-dark space. The twist that makes it work: morale isn’t flavor, it’s a system: low morale mutinies, high morale finds more salvage on the way.

Procedural crew plus a hall of fame that remembers every run gives it the one-more-run pull of the original. The memorial wall quietly tallies every colonist you couldn’t save.

A frozen survival voyage where the ember is your lifeblood: it fades every day, and blizzards drain it faster. Rest, hunt, forage, and trade your way north while the frost closes in.

Built with zero image or audio assets. The renderer draws terrain, weather, fire, and caravan procedurally, and the chiptune + SFX are synthesized in Web Audio. That constraint is the flex: no asset pipeline, no dependencies, just code.

A deep-sea descent in the spirit of Oregon Trail, starring a submersible literally named DeepSeek. The descent rate (Drift / Steady / Surge) is the core tension: go slow and suffocate, go fast and pop. Each zone gets weirder, from sunlight down to hadal black.

The share-a-run card means a good death is a story you can post: five crew, eleven kilometers of black water, one sub. Reach 10,900 m with a single crew member alive and you’ve won the expedition.

A single-file space-trading sandbox in the spirit of Escape Velocity: trade across linked systems, manage fuel, shields, and armor, buy a larger fleet, and chase achievements.

Built as one self-contained HTML file: canvas, vanilla JS, Web Audio, zero network assets. Progress resumes via a copy-paste SAVE CODE, the way the old games did it.

Built as a riff on the training process itself: every TRAIN is one epoch, your learning rate is the gas pedal, and your crew are the model’s capabilities: attention, reasoning, recall, calibration. Random events are real ML failure modes, and surviving them means assigning the right capability at the right time.

The glossary doubles as a cheat-sheet for the actual concepts, so dying to reward hacking literally teaches you what reward hacking is. Convergence is the win condition; the abyss is one careless learning-rate bump away.

The Oregon Trail formula recut for the age of sail. The twist that makes it work: you can't buy progress. Every day the wind belts decide your pace. Ride the trade winds, survive the doldrums' calms and rain squalls, and streak east in the Roaring Forties at 300+ miles a day while the rigging grinds down. Your sail plan (reefed / steady / full canvas) trades speed against canvas wear and squall risk every single day.

Water is the hard wall: 1,200 gallons, dry casks kill within days. Scurvy runs on an honest vitamin-C clock. Lime juice rations freeze it, fresh fruit in port cures it, neglect costs the crew. Cape Horn is the set-piece: drive through, wait three days for a weather window, or stand away south among the bergs. Six ports, shifting cargo markets, a reaction-timing squall minigame, and a burial-at-sea ledger. 127 days is a passage for the gods.

The twist that makes it not-Oregon-Trail: every action you issue is a prompt you send to NEXUS-7, and the building decides what to do with it. The louder you are, the more aggressive its classifiers get. But if you push the AI into a high hallucination state, its own classifiers start mistaking you for a scheduled janitor, and you can walk past cameras that are actively looking at you.

Three signature mini-games carry the heist: a 5-digit door-sniff puzzle where one digit is highlighted in amber, a camera-spoof picker where 3 of 5 badges share a hidden property (color, shape, or sigil), and a 4-wheel vault crack where the wheels glow green when you have found the right number. Three cover identities (Janitorial Vendor, Compliance Auditor, Rogue Researcher) shift your starting balance and push you toward different playstyles. Single-file vanilla JS, canvas, and Web Audio. No network assets, just code.

The Oregon Trail formula carried to 8,849 meters. Oxygen is the core tension: bottles burn every day above the Lhotse Face, the flow valve (off / 2 / 4 litres per minute) trades gas against your mind, and a team that enters the death zone without bottled air does not come back. Storms pin you in camp, every rest day high on the mountain costs a second day of acclimatization, and the monsoon arrives around day 34 no matter where you stand.

Two signature mini-gates carry the climb: probing the snow bridges of the Khumbu Icefall one ladder at a time, and matching your rest-step breathing rhythm to lead the Hillary Step. Events run from crevasse falls and frostbite to an old Swiss cache and summit fever at the evening meal. Vanilla JS, canvas, and Web Audio. Zero assets; everything on screen is code. Getting five ropes up is a good climb; a good death is still a story.

No engine, no libraries, no assets. The renderer is written by hand against WebGL2: the terrain streams in and is rebuilt as the wagon moves, the oxen walk in their teams, dust kicks up behind the wheels, and the sky runs a full day and night cycle while the weather changes with the region and the month. It all ships as one self-contained HTML file.

Every sound is synthesized at runtime with the Web Audio API, which is what keeps it a single file. Wind, rain, snow and river ambience track the weather and the distance to water, hoofbeats lock to the ox gait, and a generative minor-key music bed brightens as the wagon gets closer to Oregon. All eighteen landmarks, river crossings and forts on the trail are modelled at their real mileages.