Games · Playable · In development
Run the house. Make the magazine.
The Publisher’s Desk
Pulp Empire is a browser game I am developing about running a pulp publishing house in the 1930s. You choose the stories, work with writers, design the covers and decide how many copies to send to the newsstands.
It combines my interest in pulp magazines, book design and publishing with a business simulation. The game is available to play now; I continue to develop it whenever a new idea is worth trying.
An editor’s choices
Read submissions, negotiate fees, request revisions and balance complete stories with serials. Six editorial territories cover weird fiction, science fiction, detective stories, adventure, fight stories and spicy adventures. Writers have personalities and remember how you treat them; readers have different tastes, and a rival publisher competes for their attention.
From manuscript to newsstand
Choose paintings and illustrations, arrange the issue and set the cover price, marketing and print run. Sales, returns and unpaid contracts all affect the house accounts. You can expand to several magazines, build recurring heroes and keep a shelf of finished issues. Each issue becomes a readable, illustrated magazine with condensed fiction, advertisements and reader letters.
The game is in English. Campaigns save in your browser, with downloadable backups. The setting draws on pulp history; the publishing house, most characters and the economic rules are fictional.