Poop of the Gods
| Poop of the Gods | |
|---|---|
 The title's illustration in Early Releases on Maxine's Quest: a toilet floating among stars beneath a flying saucer | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Platform(s) | Maxine's Quest (planned) |
| Release | Unreleased |
| Genre(s) | "Tempest meets Qbert" (planned) |
Poop of the Gods is a planned video game by Molecular Reality Corporation, the eighth and last title announced in the memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest of about 2022. Its field of science is given as "in fimo biology", and its design brief reads, in full: "Style: Tempest meets Qbert but with giant alien space-gods who poop."[1] Players were to run feces from many species through a nanopore instrument as part of play.
The title first appeared in an advertisement of 2021 and came fifth of seven in a poll of the company's applicants that year. It has not been made.
Design
The memo is the primary source for the game, and its entry has three lines: the science, the style and the analytes. Seven of the memo's eight titles list what they were "Inspired by". Poop of the Gods alone has a "Style".[1]
The two games it names share a structure. In Atari's Tempest (1981), a color vector game, the player's claw-shaped ship moves around the rim of a geometric tube seen in perspective and fires down it at enemies climbing up from the far end. In Gottlieb's Q*bert (1982) the player hops around a pyramid of 28 cubes drawn in isometric view, changing the color of each top it lands on. Each confines its player to the surface of one fixed geometric figure. Neither game has gods, aliens or excrement; the third element is the memo's own.
The memo does not say who the player is, or what a player's sample does in the game. A technical overview the company published in December 2022 calls its instrument program, Maxine's Quest, "the portal for all our early game releases"; in that program spikes in the current through a pore create the game's events.[2] In 2026 the founder described the titles as "wrappers" for it.[3]
Science
In fimo is Latin for "in dung", formed on the pattern of in vitro ("in glass") and in vivo ("in the living"). The phrase is the memo's coinage for the study of stool.
Stool is the most accessible sample of the gut microbiome. A gram of it holds on the order of 1011 bacteria, and a 2016 recount of the cells in a human body put bacteria and human cells at roughly equal numbers, about 1.3 to 1, a revision of the old figure of ten to one in favor of the bacteria.[4] Bacterial cells are about a micrometer long, a size that a Coulter counter or a pore of a few micrometers counts one particle at a time, which is the kind of measurement the company's instruments make.
Samples
The analytes are "Poop! From diverse species, irradiated to destroy biohazards in samples we ship. Locally sourced by players as well with full protocols yet to be determined. Explore the sacred stinky!"[1] Ionizing radiation sterilizes a sample chiefly by breaking the DNA of whatever lives in it. The cells and particles a pore would count remain, but the organisms are dead, so the company's shipped samples would have been a microbiome without the microbes' life. Samples from players themselves were left to protocols "yet to be determined".
Influences
The space-gods are the only part of the brief with no game behind them. In 2024 the founder credited a graphic novel series, which he did not name, in which characters come upon the giant floating bodies of dead gods at the edge of the solar system.[5] The title has the same shape as Chariots of the Gods?, Erich von Däniken's 1968 book proposing that the gods of ancient myth were visiting astronauts; no company source mentions the book.
Tempest and Q*bert belong to the years from 1977 to 1985, the era of the Atari Video Computer System and the golden age of the arcade, from which every game named in the memo comes except FarmVille.[1]
Reception
The company's 2021 Facebook advertisement, We're on an epic quest, listed the game among its "Molecular Games™" with the line "explore the sacred stinky".[2] The sign-up form of the same year asked each applicant which early-release game they would choose. In a sample of 135 answers Poop of the Gods received 16 votes, fifth of the seven titles on the form, behind "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!" with 26 and ahead of Molecules of Mars with 14.[5]
Legacy
The company's streaming plan of May 2026 lists three wrappers besides Maxine's Quest: "DogeBio (poop), Dragon Tyrant (aging via spit), Raindrop Planet (backyard water)".[6] The sample had passed to DogeBio, the memo's game about the company dog. In the same plan's sketch of the DogeBio wrapper, the voltage knob of Maxine's Quest is relabeled "Sniff intensity" and the zapper "FLUSH".[6]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "platform". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Sender, R.; Fuchs, S.; Milo, R. (2016). "Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body". PLOS Biology 14 (8): e1002533. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.