SARS Invaders
| SARS Invaders | |
|---|---|
 The memo's illustration for SARS Odyssey: a cluster of virus particles beside a wheel-shaped space station | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Platform(s) | Maxine's Quest (planned) |
| Release | Unreleased |
| Genre(s) | Shooter; virology |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
SARS Invaders, first called 2021: A SARS Odyssey and later SARS Odyssey, is a planned game about virology by Molecular Reality Corporation. Like the company's other titles of the period, it was to run on the instrument software Maxine's Quest, with each player feeding real samples through a nanopore and the game built from the signals. Its samples were to be plastic beads and fat particles, with "no real viruses involved in the early phase". The game was announced in a 2021 advertisement and described in the memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest" about a year later. It had not been released by October 2026.
Description
The memo gives the game three lines:[1]
Science: virology. Inspired by: 2d Galaga, Missile Command, Defender, and Megamania, 3d Star Raiders and Star Wars. Major analytes: polystyrene beads with different surface functionalities, lipid particles. Focus on selective algorithm development, no real viruses involved in the early phase.
Early Releases on Maxine's Quest
Polystyrene beads are manufactured spheres of very even size, used to calibrate particle counters, and their surfaces can be made to carry chemical groups that change their electric charge. Lipid particles are small bubbles of fatty membrane. The coronavirus behind COVID-19 measures about 60 to 140 nm across and is wrapped in such a membrane,[2] so beads and lipid particles of that size can stand in for virions without any risk of infection. The phrase "selective algorithm development" refers to software that tells such particles apart by the pulses they make as they cross a pore. In the 2021 advertisement the game's line was "the quest to stop all infectious disease transmission begins!"[3]
Name
The first title recalls Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The memo's illustration pairs a cluster of virus particles with a wheel-shaped space station of the kind seen in the film. By the time of the memo, the year had already been dropped from the heading, which reads "SARS Odyssey".[1] A company website of February 2026 listed the game under its present name: "SARS Invaders: (FKA 2021: A SARS Odyssey but we didn't ship in 2021 and had to change the name!)"[4] The founder has called the new name "a pun on Space Invaders",[5] Taito's 1978 arcade game in which rows of aliens march down the screen toward the player's cannon.
Influences
The memo divides the game's sources into two dimensions and three. The flat ones are shooters of the early 1980s: Namco's Galaga (1981), whose insect-like enemies can capture the player's ship with a tractor beam; Williams's Defender (1981); Activision's Megamania (1982) for the Atari 2600; and Atari's Missile Command (1980), in which the player defends six cities from falling missiles with three anti-missile batteries. Missile Command has no winning end. When the last city falls, the screen shows the words THE END. The three-dimensional ones are Atari's Star Raiders (1979 or 1980), flown from the cockpit, and Atari's vector-drawn Star Wars arcade game (1983).[1]
Background
The company's interest in viruses predates the game. In January 2020, the founder later wrote, "We saw covid coming", and the company tried to launch its Molecular Aquarium in response, an effort it called CoronaPore.[6] He named a 2018 paper as "a key paper that gave us confidence": its authors had trained a simple machine-learning model to recognize single virions of different serotypes of the same virus, although "the serotypes are all roughly the same size and shape".[6][7] The same group reported in 2021 that a nanopore combined with machine learning could tell the COVID-19 virus apart from other coronaviruses,[8] the kind of "selective algorithm development" the memo assigns to its players. Its commercial spin-off, Aipore, concluded its activities in 2025. See Virus detection with nanopores.
Reception
The 2021 sign-up form asked each new member which early game they would choose. In a sample of 135 answers, "2021: A SARS Odyssey" received 23 votes, third behind "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!" with 26 and "Raindrop Planet" with 25.[5]
See also
- We're on an epic quest (advertisement)
- Space Invaders
- MoleculArcade, whose planned titles include Molecular Invaders and Crispr Command
References
- ^ a b c "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ "A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019". New England Journal of Medicine 382 (8): 727-733. 2020. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2001017.
- ^ "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. February 2026.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "(no subject)". EQBio-OS.
- ^ "Selective detections of single-viruses using solid-state nanopores". Scientific Reports 8: 16305. 2018. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-34665-4.
- ^ "Combining machine learning and nanopore construction creates an artificial intelligence nanopore for coronavirus detection". Nature Communications 12: 3726. 2021. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24001-2.