Introversion — the British game devs who created Darwinia and Uplink — talked to Firing Squad about their upcoming strategy game about thermonuclear war, Defcon. We particularly liked this bit about the game's Office Mode. We need more games you can play in an office.

We're very excited by Office Mode. The basic idea is that a group of work-mates can start the game up in the morning in Office Mode, playing over their local area network. The game takes place entirely in real-time (you can quite easily end the world with nuclear conflict in 8 hours) and each player controls one territory, e.g. North America or Russia. You can hit the Panic key (press escape twice) which immediately removes the game from the screen and places a discreet icon in your system tray. That icon changes when important things happen - for example if you detect some nuclear launches the icon will flash as a Nuke for a few seconds. Because everything is taking place in real-time you've got at least 30 minutes before those nukes land, so you've got plenty of time to respond without interfering with your real work too much.

A quick personal anecdote about Boss keys after the jump.

When I was 12, subversively playing the Leisure Suit Larry games, I kept my finger hovering millimeters above the "Boss" key. The theory was that to offset the chances of my mother discovering my soft-core adventure porn obsession — looming behind me in that stance of matriarchal contempt that quickly follows those moments when your mother accidentally discovers she gave birth to a leering pervert — I would quickly press it in an emergency.

Unfortunately, at the time I didn't realize that the laughable abstraction of Leisure Suit Larry genitalia (a flesh colored horizontal exclamation point next to a cherry red capital I surrounded in parentheses with a plump w dangling below) would have conjured up no pornographic associations in her mind. On the other hand, her suspicion was immediately aroused when she found her son feverishly scrutinizing a pareto chart of Wall Street Stocks when she came into the room, calling for a much closer inspection. FLORIAN ECKHARDT

Defcon Interview [Firing Squad]

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