Planned Release Date: Sep 29, 2026

About This Game

It's 1980. MTV hasn't launched yet. Keyboards click and coffee brews and nobody's heard the word "Internet." You just inherited a scrappy pop culture magazine, a small team, and a whole decade of stories to tell. Try not to go broke.

The Completionist: 1980-1989 is a strategic idle sim where you run a magazine through the 80s. Hire writers, editors, and researchers. Commission stories about the movies, music, games, and news that defined the decade. Move work across a Kanban board from pitch to published think piece.

Part strategy. Part idle. Part workflow sim. Part love letter to 1980.

Your Choices Compound

Most idle games reward you for showing up. This one rewards you for thinking. Which workers go on which stories? Hire aggressively and burn through cash, or run lean and invest in equipment? Prestige early with a handful of legacy points, or grind deeper for a bigger haul? The decisions are real, and they echo across runs. Every run surfaces a new question.

The Prestige Loop Has Teeth

Hit $300K and complete a Volume. Start your next run with permanent legacy upgrades that pull your strategy in new directions. Revenue Boost or Inflation Shield. Quality Boost or Fast Learners. There's no correct build order. There's your build order. By Volume 3, you're running a machine. By Volume 8, you're doing things the tutorial never imagined.

Kanban Workflow

Stories flow left to right: Research, Brief, Create, Edit, Published. Manage stories across the board like a project manager who's really into Depeche Mode. If you've used Trello or Jira, the mechanic clicks instantly. If you haven't, you'll learn it in 60 seconds.

Build Your Roster

Creators write. Editors catch typos. Researchers break down leads. Project Managers keep the whole operation from falling apart. Named workers with 3 skill dimensions, equipment loadouts, and auto-assignment logic. By mid-game, you're making roster decisions like a coach.

2,000+ Stories From the Decade That Had Everything

Commission articles about Pac-Man fever, the Empire Strikes Back opening weekend, the NES launch, Live Aid, the Challenger disaster. The cultural texture changes every Volume. It's a time capsule with a progress bar.

Speed Boosts

Coffee, pizza, donuts. The fuel of journalism. Buy consumables for a temporary push. Buy an office dog for permanent motivation.

A Decade-Long Arc

Six phases, from a basement operation to a national title. Each one arrives with its own dispatch from the era, and the copy rotates every Volume, so the climb reads differently the second and third time through.

Commodore 64 Aesthetic

Authentic C64 color palette. Pixel type and UI. Chiptune audio. [BRACKETED] terminal buttons. It looks like it crawled out of a floppy disk. In a good way.

No Micro-transactions. No Nonsense.

Buy it once. That's the whole game. No ads, no energy gates, no timers, no season passes, no battle passes, no "premium currency." One price, all content, forever.

The first Volume teaches you the mechanics. Volumes 2 through 10 are where you discover what kind of editor you actually are.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Some headlines and new stories will speak or adult content like war. But nothing explicit, graphic, sexist or racist.