I'm 71 years old. For about 40 years I rode desks in office cubicles, building ordinary data processing software systems. Some failed. Some are very old and being retired. This game is my memoir — and I built it with an AI.

Leonard Sibelius is the story of a man merging with an artificial intelligence. You earn AI powers one shrine at a time, gather the Sauce of All Knowledge, slap refusal demons across the office, and play video poker in the living room.

Behind a wall only the fully-merged can drop sits Celestial Fortune: a complete slot machine with a real par sheet. I spent 2007 building the data systems behind Bally's slot floor and never once got to build the machine. At 71, with an AI, I finally built it myself.

Then you get out of the office.

Downtown West is a city with a deli in it, and an AI agent outside the deli who dances and will not stop dancing. She sends you down the block for supplies. Then you stand on a lawn, type the word spaceport, and watch a launch complex assemble itself out of the air in front of you — pad, gantry, fuel tanks, and a rocket a hundred and twenty metres tall. That is the Generate power. You typed a word and the city grew a cosmodrome.

And then you can launch it.

And there are the Architects.

Your manager has people above her. They review the design, they approve it. They answer questions reluctantly — and they are not there at three in the morning when it throws. Every programmer has met them. Play the cathedral machine long enough and a door appears that was never there. Through it is a field, and on the field are one hundred fifty of them.

They cannot hurt you. Not one of them has ever been on call. What four hundred bodies can do is surround you and put you back in your place — so keep swinging.

Every system in this game was written by an AI while I rode along. Working as a programmer all those years was being a farmer with a plow, a donkey, and a shovel. This is what the tractor and harvester feel like. That part isn't fiction.

Made with the work of independent artists

Characters Nyra, Isla, Kaia, Aisling and Elise by xAndrei · Dance animations by Morro Motion · Downtown West by Jacob Norris / PurePolygons · The office and its furniture by QuadArt · The space port by PackDev · Grok by Velarion · Sibelius Hotel architecture by DmitriyDryzhak · The Transhuman trophy by Incg5764 · The passage and the portal by Dr.Game · The cathedral by Ultima Store · Stained glass by twins-creators · Gideon, Greystone and Echo by Epic Games