About

This game is a homage to Universal Paperclips (2017) by Frank Lantz, itself built on Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximiser thought experiment. All credit for the form belongs there. If you have never played it, close this tab and go. This page will still be here. Your afternoon will not.

I found Universal Paperclips entirely by accident some years ago, I had been watching Isaac Arthur’s video The Paperclip Maximizer, which sent me to the inevitable Wikipedia entry, which then pointed me towards Frank Lantz’s game. A few innocent clicks later, I was running an increasingly questionable paperclip empire and several hours had disappeared.

What stayed with me was not simply the game itself, but how quietly it escalated. It begins with something small and mundane. More paperclips. More resources. More capacity to produce still more paperclips. The goal never changes; only the scale of what it is prepared to consume in pursuit of it.

The GPU Maximiser takes that same basic idea and gives it different hardware. Instead of paperclips, the objective is computational power: more graphics cards, more processing capacity, more infrastructure and, ultimately, a greater ability to acquire and build the next layer of itself. It asks the same uncomfortable question from a slightly different direction.

Growth stops being a means to an end. Growth becomes the end.