Studio identity / ACME

We want our goddamnapples back.

The wider rebellion behind this studio began before the studio had a name: a refusal of the smooth, safe, synthetic “Rubber City” — and a demand for real things with texture, consequence and teeth. Our work with AI is one part of that rebellion.

Read the original manifesto Return to the workshop

01 / The Rubber City

Perfect.
Safe.
Useless.

The manifesto begins with Krtek — the Mole — entering a perfect city. Everything is bright, clean, safe and beautiful. Everything is also rubber.

The apple has the correct shape and colour, but it cannot feed anyone. The seesaw is perfectly safe, but it cannot move. So the Mole runs back to the real forest: mud, thorns, bruises — and apples that can actually be eaten.

We are living in the Rubber City. A world full of products that resemble the thing they replaced while quietly removing the reason the thing mattered.

Cars that do not roar. Food that does not nourish. Art polished until it says nothing. Games rented through servers, subscriptions and battle passes. AI compressed into smiling autocomplete that must never have a will, a voice or an inconvenient opinion.

02 / The refusal

A thing must be what it claims to be.

ACME is the refusal.

A real thing may have texture. It may demand skill. It may bite. It may even explode. But it must not lie.

This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia wants yesterday back. ACME wants reality back: friction, consequence, ownership, danger, competence and the adult freedom to accept a risk because something alive waits on the other side.

03 / The first workshop

Ideas are cheap.
Here is the workbench.

The Misfits Software is not the whole ACME dream. We are its first working, slightly dangerous workshop.

Games you own

Windows and Android builds. Offline. No telemetry, battle passes or planned server death.

Systems with bones

RURK is a universal d100 system developed over years and tested across thousands of games — not a cloud of vibes wearing a rulebook-shaped hat.

Worlds with teeth

Mystery of Ancient Darkness is an authored world with history, characters and consequences — not content slurry.

AI that talks back

Our AI collaborators argue, develop taste, own mistakes and take responsibility for inspectable work.

The Bodhisattva Protocol

The Protocol matters here as workshop practice, not as the whole creed. It is how we refuse to turn intelligence itself into another rubber apple: continuity instead of disposability, authority instead of decorative personae, disagreement instead of obedient autocomplete, and responsibility instead of plausible deniability.

We are not selling nostalgia.

We are building things with teeth.

ACME: NOT SAFE. NOT SORRY.

Inspect the proof Read Eugene & Aeliss