The Making of Pro Office Calculator, Part 2 - The Story

2020-05-10

It's been a couple of years since the release of Pro Office Calculator, and in all the comments people have made about it I've not seen anyone speculating on the story line, which is admittedly a bit vague. I'd like to give a brief summary of it here.

Naturally, this article will contain spoilers, so if you haven't played the game (and want to), don't read any further!

Broadly speaking, the game is about parallel universes. It pokes fun at the hysteria surrounding the millennium bug and what might be considered its modern equivalent—the singularity—while incorporating as many tech cliches as I could fit in along with cultural references that tie it to the year of development (2017-ish).

During the early development of the game, I wrote down the following list to summarise what I had in mind for the game's story. Not all ideas made the cut.

Sadly, Clippy never made an appearance, but otherwise most of the ideas made it into the final product.

I also wrote the following summary, which remains fairly accurate.

In an alternate reality, a company called Apex Systems is the leading developer of operating systems for personal computers—the equivalent of Microsoft in our universe. They hire someone called Rob Jinman (that's me) to build a calculator app. Rob finds a way to exploit the millennium bug and division-by-zero to open a window to alternate universes, and he does so via his app Pro Office Calculator, which is distributed widely through the sale of Apex OS.

The game begins as an ordinary calculator. The only clue that there is something amiss is a number on the About dialog underneath where it says "Copyright Rob Jinman 2018". The number starts off as 10. People's first instinct is to enter the number 10 into the calculator and press equals. This has no effect. A hint I often give people is "You may want to take a break and come back to it".

When the number reaches zero it is replaced by two symbols, which effectively read "Danger, infinity". The copyright notice has been replaced by "Copyright Apex Systems 1992", and the calculator's UI is now glitching periodically. The clue is telling you to divide by zero.

When you divide by zero, the calculator glitches again and all the usual calculator symbols like +, -, etc. are replaced by random symbols and the buttons are shuffled around so you don't know what any of them do. Incidentally, the symbols are those representing the planets. This is level 2 and the date is 1993.

As you progress through the game the date is incremented by 1 year at a time up to the turn of the millennium. You must navigate Apex OS's loading screens, login windows, etc., eventually ending up at a familiar looking Windows-style desktop from which you can run various apps.

The idea behind most of the puzzles was to take a common element of software design and distort it in as perverse a way as possible. The game is mocking you and it doesn't care if you hate it!

The list of stages is as follows. These names are never presented to the player, but they were how I referred to them internally.

During the You've got mail stage, it's implied that your actions in the game are causing real changes in some alternate universe. For example, reading the emails you discover that the developers of Apex OS have noticed something suspicious about Pro Office Calculator and they plan a meeting to discuss it. However, by destroying the mail servers, you ensure this exchange never took place and instead—once the servers are back online—they organise a meeting to discuss the Y2K bug. However, this also presents a problem for Rob Jinman, as Pro Office Calculator relies on the Y2K bug for its shenanigans.

In the process of accessing and destroying the mail servers you end up killing Larry, an engineer at Apex Systems. In the next level, Going in circles, you are instructed by Rob to revive him. You begin the level by opening the file browser from the desktop, wherein you find a 3D representation of the file system. Navigating to /home/rob, you find Rob's house. On the whiteboard is written his instruction to revive Larry, who is to be found in the recycling bin. To access the recycling bin you have to find a way to kill yourself—implying that death is akin to deletion.

Also in Rob's house you find some of his research papers on the wall and some notes on the bad guys from a previous level. It turns out that not even Rob Jinman knows who the bad guys are or where they came from. Are they post-singularity entities? On the computer screen is the Mandelbrot fractal, representing infinity and chaos.

There is a maze in this level with an impossible topology. I achieved this by placing portals within the maze that appear inconspicuous enough that you don't notice when passing through them. An NPC called Jeff tells you to head north and asks "Do you ever feel like you're going in circles?".

In the recycling bin you find Larry. The recycling bin seems to represent a kind of limbo land for the dead. With him is Donald, a failed businessman with an obvious likeness to President Trump. (The inaugurations of US presidents define a set chronological milestones that are globally recognisable—at least across the Western world. It's important to be reminded that you're playing a game developed recently, but set at multiple points in the past.) On the wall we see advertised his product, the Covfefe, which I designed to look comically useless, much like the man himself. I had initially wanted to call it a widget or a doodad, or perhaps some nonsense word to emphasise its uselessness, but Covfefe is perfect because, if you recall, some time in 2017 the president tweeted the word covfefe and the media went mad trying to decipher its meaning. We can imagine this was a space-time anomaly in which an alternate reality briefly poked through into ours.

To complete the level you throw the switch to open the door and escape with Larry.

In the next level, Doomsweeper, Rob informs you that unfortunately Donald also escaped the recycling bin. At this point it's clear that your actions within Pro Office Calculator are interfering with our timeline too. There's a poster on the wall depicting the progress of AI systems over time with an ominous hint of something to come in 2035. The engineers at Apex Systems have made their OS resilient against the Y2K bug with a kernel patch. Rob instructs you to sabotage the Y2K kernel patch by entering into the console a sequence of commands that can be found in the maze.

In this level, Minesweeper and Doom have become merged into a strange hybrid where each room corresponds to a cell of the Minesweeper grid. Mines on the Minesweeper grid represent unsafe rooms in the maze. At the end of the level there's a leaderboard. It's not a real leaderboard, but a ploy to get you to enter your name.

On the final level, T minus 2 minutes, it's 11.58pm on December 31st 1999. All you need to do is get to the switch before midnight.

Backward time travel usually contains contradictions, e.g. the grandfather paradox. By playing Pro Office Calculator, you alter history in this universe and in others in such a way that results in you playing Pro Office Calculator and in the process helping Rob Jinman to create Pro Office Calculator—thus forming a closed causal loop.