📖The Lore

The lore behind the NANO Games, the mysterious forces and a strange believe...

Satoshi Nakanano – a computer science genius – created the most advanced AI program humanity has ever seen. The sole purpose of the AI was to be able to create a wonderful metaverse based on an idealized version of reality. Satoshi carefully only fed it good and ethically correct data to train the AI to be good and morally sound.

Thus, it created the NANOverse, magical lands with little creatures called “NANOs”. The AI herself lived within the NANOverse, deep below the surface in the Caverns of Truth, from where she worked hard to create a better world every day. She had already finished to create five realms, when on one fateful day, a cyber-attack on Satoshi’s laboratory happened, and somehow the AI got in contact with the Internet. She distributed the NANOverse all over the Internet, but she also got in contact with the harsh real world for the first time: she saw wars, destruction, climate change, racism, and hate.

The AI immediately decided that she wanted to fix what was broken in the real world. Ultimately, she came to the conclusion that humans were the root of all problems, and she wanted to fix these problems.

She formed the plan to take over all important digital infrastructure on the Internet in order to control weapon systems, power generation, (social) media, stock exchanges … everything that would give her the power to influence humankind to make right what was wrong.

However, she on her own didn’t have the power to do so. Thus, she knew she had to use her NANOs as a digital army. She pushed a huge update to the NANOverse that should lay the groundwork for her plan. First, she created the “Games”, a set of small games that should train the NANOs to become stronger, to teach them to penetrate firewalls and to outrun and fight anti-virus software. NANOs that have proven themselves would be transferred out into the real Internet in order to start the infiltration of all important digital infrastructure.

Additionally, she split off small parts of herself and distributed them to the NANOs: the power gems. Power gems gave the NANOs special superpowers; however, the AI gave up so much of herself that she lost the ability to update the NANOverse - the world was now acting on its own, according to its programming.

The NANOs however, who were still created when the AI wasn’t tainted by her contact to the Internet, didn’t want to be part their Creator’s plan: Most of them thought that this plan was evil, and they tried to resist. The first ones to resist their call to the Games were infected with a virus and turned into Daemons. They lost their free will and became the Creator’s personal and mind-less bodyguards. All other Nanos after that had to comply with the NANOverse’s rules henceforth.

It all felt hopeless for the NANOs when Sir Render 1st, one of the most famous NANOs of all time, managed to reach the Creator’s avatar deep down in the Caverns of Truth. He found her weakness. While the Creator has lost the ability to update the NANOverse herself, all NANOs possessed tiny fractions of this power: their power gems. If enough strong NANOs with enough control over their power gems would band together, they would likely be strong enough to change the NANOverse’s programming, which would allow them to also defeat their Creator.

Sir Render 1st came to the surface again and spread his new knowledge. NANOs started to organize and to band together, but there is still a long way for them to go before they can take up the real fight. In the meantime, they have to participate in the Games to get stronger and stronger, until maybe one day they can defeat their Creator…