Press kit

Megahertz

An idle merge game about the history of computing. Drag two abacuses together and get a slide rule. Do that forty-one more times.

The demo is the fastest way to understand the game and it takes twelve to eighteen minutes. It is the same code as the iPhone build. No install, no account, no email.

Fact sheet

The pitch, at three lengths

One line

An idle merge game about the history of computing, where the desk is the progress bar.

One paragraph

Megahertz is an idle merge game about the history of computing. Two machines of the same tier fuse into one of the next, free and instantly, from an abacus at one hertz to an artificial sun at 103 petahertz. There are forty-two machines across seven eras, and every era rebuilds the room around you: the desk, the light, the props and the whole colour grade. It has no energy meter, no timer between merges and no advertisement you did not press a button to see.

Three paragraphs

Megahertz is an idle merge game about the history of computing. The rule is one sentence long: two machines of the same tier fuse into one machine of the next tier, free, instant, no cost and no cooldown. Because the income curve is exponential, the result earns more than the two you spent while also freeing a slot, so there is no wrong merge, and that is a sentence with no asterisk on it. The ladder runs from an abacus producing one cycle a second to an artificial sun producing 103 petahertz, forty-two machines in all.

What makes it different from everything else on that shelf is that the room is the progress bar. Seven eras, six machines each, and each era rebuilds the environment around you in a ten-second transition: oak and brass on a schoolhouse desk, bakelite and filament on a 1940s workbench, institutional grey on a raised computer-room floor, walnut and red LED on bedroom carpet in 1979, beige plastic in a 1997 cubicle, black glass and RGB, and finally ceramic and plasma in orbital void. Across a run the light migrates out of the room and into your hardware: era one has a warm lamp and machines that emit nothing, era seven has an almost-black void and machines that are the only light source left.

It is also built as an argument about how a free game can behave. There is no energy system, no timer between actions, nothing randomised for sale, and no advertisement that plays without being asked for. Board slots are bought with the currency you earn, and the first one arrives in the first minute so the point is made immediately. The shop links to a screen called WHAT MONEY BUYS which lists every paid item beside the free route to the same thing and roughly how many hours that route takes, measured, generated from the catalogue by a test that runs on every build. Cycles and Patents, the two currencies that move you up the ladder, cannot be bought at any price.

Features

• 42 machines, 7 eras. Abacus, slide rule, Jacquard loom, relay rack, tube bank, core plane, tape drive, line printer, the homebrew wedge, the beige tower, the blade chassis, the cryostat, the orbital ring, the artificial sun.
• The room rebuilds around you. A ten-second era transition changes the desk, the light, the props, the ambience and the post-process grade, and then you keep playing in the new room.
• THE CASCADE. Raise the merge ceiling on a saturated board and the whole thing detonates, one pair at a time, with the combo chime climbing.
• The Overnight Cache. Close the app and it fills. Come back and 140 punch cards burst across the screen and pay out at once. Coming back after a month costs exactly what coming back after a second costs.
• Overclock. Triple output for thirty seconds, with the grade shifting red, the bloom rising and a heat gauge you have to respect.
• Reboot. A prestige loop twenty-five runs deep, into Patents and a fifty-node tree across five branches.
• A real museum. Every machine carries a card describing what the real thing was, when it was built and why it mattered. The names are affectionate parodies; the history is not.
• A terminal logbook. Seven amber-terminal entries, one per era, in the voice of the engineer whose desk this is.
• Weekly Benchmark leaderboards through Game Center, with no account of ours anywhere.

The monetisation policy, in full

This is usually the least interesting section of a press kit. Here it is the story, so it is stated completely rather than summarised.

Advertising

Five rewarded video placements, and no other advertising of any kind. Each one is opt-in, each one is hard-capped per day, and each one pays the player something: double the overnight payout, four times output for four minutes, an instant cooldown reset, a free machine, or a quarter more prestige currency. No ad opens the app. No ad plays between screens. Nothing interrupts anything. There is no banner. Settings contains a free switch that hides the offers entirely, and turning it on takes nothing away.

The zero-forced-ads position costs roughly 12% of projected advertising revenue. It was taken deliberately, in writing, before launch.

Purchases

A small, flat catalogue: two automation tools, three sizes of soft currency, a cosmetic engraving ladder, cosmetic desk sets, a founder's bundle, and an optional monthly or annual pass. Every paid item that affects gameplay is also reachable free through the in-game Patent Tree, and the app prints the hours each free route takes on a screen anyone can read before buying.

Cycles and Patents cannot be bought at any price. Nothing sold adds a tier, a multiplier, a Cycle or a Patent. There are no loot boxes, no gacha, no mystery chests, no rerolls and nothing randomised, which is also why the game carries no simulated-gambling content descriptor. There are no starter packs with countdowns, no VIP ladders, and no energy to refill.

The only two things priced above ten dollars are an annual plan of the same subscription sold monthly, which is a discount rather than a new product, and the top rung of a cosmetic nameplate ladder that has no gameplay effect whatsoever.

How it was built

Megahertz is a TypeScript and WebGL2 game in a Capacitor shell, which is why the same source tree that ships to the App Store also runs as a playable link. That decision bought the demo for about two days of work; the alternative plan had costed it at two to three weeks and correctly rejected it.

There is no artist on this project and no bought art. Every machine is procedural geometry generated from about seven lines of parameters: a silhouette class, an aspect signature, a light count and a motion signature. The look comes from a deferred-ish forward renderer with a bevel pass, a Sobel outline over depth and normals, a bloom chain and a per-era post-process grade, on a palette of ten neutrals and eight signal colours that never changes between eras. A perceptual-hash render gate runs in the build and fails it if the board stops looking like itself.

It runs at 60 frames a second, which is WebKit's ceiling for requestAnimationFrame inside a web view, and the one gesture that has to feel immediate, the dragged tile, is composited outside the canvas so it reaches the display's real refresh rate regardless.

The simulation is a pure module that imports nothing: no DOM, no framework, no clock of its own, with time always arriving as a parameter. A lint fence makes that a red build rather than a convention. It never accumulates money either. A balance is an anchor point plus a rate, computed on demand, which is why online and offline are the same function.

One request about wording

Please write "no forced ads" and not "no ads." Megahertz does show rewarded video, and it is opt-in. We have refused the "ad-free" framing everywhere in our own marketing, including in the App Store keyword field where it would have been worth real money, because it is the claim that produces the review saying it says no ads and there are ads. The accurate versions are all stronger anyway: no ads you did not ask for, every ad in this game is one you pressed, no ad on launch, ever.

Similarly, we do not claim to be the first merge game about computers. We are not. The narrower claim we do make is that nobody has made computing history the art identity, the audio identity and the environmental progression of one.

Assets

Screenshots at 1290 x 2796, the 30-second app preview, the icon at 1024, era comparison plates, the logo on light and dark, and short loop captures of the merge, the cascade and an era transition are all available. Email megahertz@closiq.app and you will get a link the same day.

Everything in the kit is cleared for editorial use without asking, including monetised video. You do not need permission to cover this game, review it, stream it or take it apart.

Boilerplate