Games Like CEO.exe

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, and you play all of it inside a simulated 1990s office computer — a machine that boots, hums, glows and occasionally crashes. There is no HUD and no menu screen. There is a desktop, a taskbar, and a slowly growing number of programs you had to earn.

Start at the bottom of the in-tray

Documents land in your tray. You drag them into the filer one at a time and get paid per document. Red carbons are junk — bin them, or file one by mistake and lose the work. Sort the post into the right folders. Key the figures into CALC.EXE without fumbling the arithmetic. It is exactly as glamorous as it sounds, and it is where everybody starts.

Automate yourself out of a job

Every click you make is a candidate for its own abolition. MACRO.BAT files for you. RUNALL.BAT clears the tray in slabs. SHRED.BAT learns to spot the junk. RULES.BAT sorts the post. Requisition a faster CPU, more RAM and a bigger disk out of the IT budget — and when that stops being enough, set the TURBO jumper and 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 that takes your backlog with it.

Hire the people who replace you

Manager grade gets you chairs. 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. Push overtime and you will get more out of the room, and eventually a resignation letter. Your best clerks can be promoted into sub-managers who compile the reports you used to compile by hand. 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: forward an inconvenient document, take credit for somebody else's quarter, strike an alliance, or quietly undermine the man ahead of you. Every reorganisation removes the weakest director in the room. Sometimes that is a rival. Sometimes it is you, and you spend the next cycle on probation, watching a clock you no longer control.

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 — good and bad. A full climb from intern to the top floor runs roughly nine to ten hours, and it is built to be played in the gaps of a day.

Also on the desktop