About This Game

Every molecule in Atomica is a real one. This is Scripps Research's cellPACK model of Mycoplasma genitalium, one of the smallest living things: about 120,000 proteins, ribosomes and strands of DNA and RNA, each where the model places it, inside a membrane of 660,000 lipids. You are the size of a couple of atoms. The cell is a three-kilometre climb.

Climb. Run across proteins, double-jump between them, grab a wall and climb it. Ligands launch you upward. The global leaderboard keeps the fastest time out of the cell.

Look closer. Point at anything to learn what it is and what it does. Open a protein into its atoms; its binding sites glow gold.

Do chemistry. Collect ligands, dock them into binding sites, and when a substrate fits its enzyme, the reaction happens. Run glycolysis, nine enzymes long, and make ATP.

Simulate. Watch phosphoglycerate kinase's atoms move under a real force field, computed live by OpenMM.

Listen. What you hear is the cell's real activity turned into sound: Brownian motion, ribosomes adding amino acids, ATP synthase's rotor turning a hundred times a second.

Quests, cards and riddles, eight Steam achievements, a visitor waiting above the cell, and VR Explore: fly through the cell in a PC VR headset (the climb, docking and the info panel are flat-screen only).

Fourteen languages. Free, and it will stay free.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Atomica's translations into the thirteen languages other than English were made by an AI language model and have not yet been reviewed by native speakers. Much of the game's code and the store text were written with AI assistance. Nothing else is AI-generated. The cell is assembled by ordinary procedural code, not machine learning, from real data: Scripps Research's cellPACK model of Mycoplasma genitalium, protein structures from the Protein Data Bank (PDB), and ligands from the wwPDB Chemical Component Dictionary (CCD). The sounds are synthesized from the cell's real activity, and the store images are in-game screenshots.