Idle merge · iPhone · playable in this browser
Two abacuses make a slide rule.
Do that forty more times and there is an artificial sun humming on your desk. Megahertz is an idle merge game about the history of computing, and the desk is the progress bar.
No install, no account, no email. It runs in this tab and it saves where you left off.
The whole game, in one line
Merge two. Get something better. Forever.
Two machines of the same tier fuse into one of the next tier. It is free, it is instant, there is no cooldown and there is no cost, and because the income base is 2.6 the result earns 1.3 times what the two you spent were earning while also freeing a slot. There is no wrong merge, and that is a sentence with no asterisk on it.
Forty-two machines. The Museum card beside each one says what the real thing was, when it was built and why it mattered. The names are affectionate parodies; the engineering is not.
The differentiator
Your desk is the progress bar.
Seven eras, and each one rebuilds the room around you: the surface, the light, the props, the ambience and the post-process grade. You start on an oak schoolhouse desk under one warm lamp, with machines that emit no light at all. You finish in orbital void, with machines that are the only light source left. Across a run the light migrates out of the room and into your hardware.
1 · Mechanical
Oak and brass, zero emissive. A schoolhouse desk under a warm lamp. Machines 1 to 6.
2 · Valve
Bakelite and filament. The first light any machine gives off. Machines 7 to 12.
3 · Mainframe
Institutional grey and phosphor, on a raised computer-room floor. Machines 13 to 18.
4 · Homebrew
Walnut, cream and red LED, on bedroom carpet in 1979. Machines 19 to 24.
5 · Beige
Beige plastic and VGA blue, in a 1997 cubicle. Machines 25 to 30.
6 · Silicon
Black glass and RGB on a dark glass desk. Machines 31 to 36.
7 · Post-silicon
Ceramic and plasma, in orbital void. Machines 37 to 42.
The part every other game makes you buy
No energy. No timers. No forced ads.
- No energy, lives, refills or hearts. Nothing in this game is gated behind waiting for a bar to fill.
- No loot boxes, gacha, mystery chests or rerolls. Nothing randomised is sold at any price, which is also why the game carries no simulated-gambling content rating.
- Board slots are bought with the currency you earn. The first one arrives in your first minute, so you learn immediately that the game is not going to sell you one.
- Cycles and Patents cannot be bought. There is no price for progress here. All forty-two machines are free and completing the ladder without paying is supported, not tolerated.
Every advertisement is one you pressed
There are five, they all pay you something, and they are all capped. No ad opens when you open the app. No ad plays between screens. Nothing interrupts anything. There is no banner anywhere.
| Offer | Where it is | What it pays | Cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| x2 CACHE | A button riding the Overnight Cache burst, for four seconds | Doubles that cache payout | 8 per day |
| PRINT RUN | A button on the desk | Four times Cycles for four minutes | 6 per day |
| RECOOL | On the Overclock cooldown dial | Resets the cooldown now | 4 per day |
| SALVAGE | A button on the desk | A free machine, one tier above your best | 3 per day |
| PATENT BONUS | On the Reboot confirmation card | A quarter more Patents from that Reboot | 1 per Reboot |
If you never tap any of these, you will never see an advertisement in this game. If you would rather not be offered them at all, Settings has a free switch that hides them, and turning it on takes nothing away from you.
And a screen that prints the receipt
The shop footer links to a page called WHAT MONEY BUYS. It lists every paid item, the free route to the same thing, and roughly how long that free route takes, measured, in hours, including the several rows where the answer is no wait at all. It is generated from the shop itself by a test that runs on every build, which is the only reason it is worth reading. The browser demo has it too; it is linked from the demo's own footer.
While you are gone
Overnight, it keeps working.
Close it and the Overnight Cache fills. Come back at breakfast and a hundred and forty punch cards burst across the screen and pay out at once.
Under the hood there is no accumulation at all: a balance is an anchor point plus a rate, and its value is computed the moment you ask for it. That is why coming back after a month costs exactly what coming back after a second costs, and why the game does not care whether it was running.
The demo
Twelve to eighteen minutes, and the money shot is in it.
The browser build is the same code as the iPhone build, cut off sixty seconds after the first era transition completes. Not at the transition: never monetise the money shot. You get the new room, you feel the first merge in it, and then it closes, and the board keeps running afterwards anyway.
In the demo
Machines 1 to 14, all of eras 1 and 2, the full drag and merge feel, THE CASCADE, COMPILE, one Overclock, the Overnight Cache with the cap compressed to twenty minutes, Museum shelf 1, the whole Patent Tree visible, and the entire era 1 to era 2 transition at full length.
Not in the demo
Eras 3 to 7 and machines 15 to 42. Reboot and the prestige loop. Every desk set. And every line of advertising and purchasing code: the web build contains no ad SDK and no shop at all, not even a disabled one.
Coming to iPhone. The browser demo is live now and it is the same renderer.