I started out last October when I came back from my gig in Germany. It was a peak moment in my life, but afterward, I felt super empty. Usually, when I get that feeling, I know I need to start creating something new.

Interestingly enough, Silly Con Valley didn’t start as a game. It started as a song.

I was trying to capture the aesthetic of Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s.

Picture this: You wake up in Palo Alto, have a cup of coffee, and smell the crisp air of California. You start up your Volvo Amazon and start heading to your company HQ. The sun is shining. You enter the office, and everyone is buzzing around. You can feel that there’s something big happening—a new OS being built, some groundbreaking technology waiting to be discovered. You spend long hours in the office, watching the sunset through the blinds, just dreaming of changing the world.

That was the setup, and I composed a track that completely captured that mood. Usually, I’d just release the song and see what happens, but for this particular track, I felt it could benefit from something else. What could it be? A short film? A music video? I didn’t know, but those didn’t feel like the proper channels.

And then it hit me. I had tried to make a couple of games last summer, and one of them was a tycoon-style prototype. What if this was a startup tycoon game where you try to create a billion-dollar company?

The game would use my music as a core mood setter for the different phases of the startup journey, and its visual style would lean heavily into the retro aesthetic of the 90s.

So, my journey began. I used AI to assist in the coding and the graphics, but the heart and soul of the idea came straight from my mind. If I sum up all the hours I’ve spent making the first release of the game, it comes out to about four weeks of full-time work (37.5 hours a week). That broke down into two solid weeks to develop the mechanics and craft the “SiliconOS 95” vaporwave-infused desktop interface, one week of rigorous playtesting, and a final week for setting up Google AdMob, AppConnect, and all the administrative stuff.

I’m super proud of the outcome and wish to expand the gameplay and mechanics even further. The game has become a full-on simulator for living the chaotic startup life.

It is deeply satirical because, let’s face it, the whole tech world is like that. I think the tech industry has really forgotten the skill to laugh at its own absurdity. Hopefully, this game will be a place to laugh and gag about the daily tropes that we churn out without a blink of an eye—whether that’s pivoting your product to chase “AI/ML Hype” and “Fintech Scams,” or burning $10,000 a week on influencer parties.

A 10-year-old Juha dreamed of many things. Making games was one of them. Now I can once again hug my 10-year-old me and say, “We did it again.”

Hopefully, you’ll take it for a spin and test it out. Pitch the finicky VCs, try not to go bankrupt, and chase that $1 Billion IPO. It would make me—and my 10-year-old version—really happy. 🙂