Nobody becomes CEO by working hard. They become CEO by arranging for the work to happen without them.

CEO.exe is an idle game about climbing a corporate ladder, played entirely inside a simulated 1990s office computer — a machine that boots, hums, glows and occasionally crashes. No HUD, no menu screen. A desktop, a taskbar, and a slowly growing number of programs you had to earn.

File it yourself. Then never again.

You start by dragging documents into the filer one at a time, paid per document, binning the red carbons before they cost you the work. Then you write the batch files that do it for you, requisition better hardware out of the IT budget, and set the TURBO jumper to run the machine past what it is rated for. It will get you through the afternoon. It will also, eventually, hand you a blue screen.

Hire the people who replace you

Manager grade gets you staff. Your section clears the tray while you do something else — as long as morale holds, wages go out at 17:00, and you notice who is drowning. The loop you spent an hour mastering becomes a line item somebody else handles.

Then it stops being about the work

At Director there is a table, six rivals and not enough chairs. Influence buys schemes: take credit for somebody else's quarter, strike an alliance, quietly undermine the man ahead of you. Every reorganisation removes the weakest director in the room. Sometimes that is you.

It runs while you are gone

Close the game and the section keeps working. Come back to a payslip, a full inbox and whatever resolved without you. A full climb from intern to the top floor runs roughly nine to ten hours, built to be played in the gaps of a day.

• A whole fake OS: draggable windows, a boot sequence, error dialogs, and a curved CRT you can turn the scanlines down on

• SNAKE.EXE and MINES.EXE, for when the tray can wait

• A run timer and achievements for a second, faster climb

• No microtransactions, no ads, no timer that asks you for money

CEO.exe is in active development. Follow and Wishlist to stay updated on the process and be the first to play the upcoming Demo!