AI turned Jira into a horror game, and your backlog is the monster

Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and one of the best known AI commentators around, asked Claude Opus to build a game. The result is WONTFIX, a horror game in the spirit of System Shock, BioShock and Dead Space whose entire plot is written from Jira tickets.

You wake up on HALCYON, an abandoned space station. The crew stopped showing up to standup, the airlock cycles on its own, and the station AI is suspiciously happy to see you. Audio logs are scattered through dark corridors: on desks, in the galley, next to the coffee machine, under a printer that will not stop printing. Every log is adapted from an ordinary work ticket. At the very bottom of the station, a server has been waiting since 2016 for someone to switch it off. It is a 3-point ticket, never closed, and it is assigned to you.

The demo runs in a desktop browser, takes about 15 minutes, and the author recommends headphones. The demo station is built from 20 made-up tickets, but the real point is that the code is open source under the MIT license, so you can turn your own backlog into a station. Export your tasks as CSV or JSON (or connect Jira directly with a JQL query), add a Claude key and an ElevenLabs key, and run one command. The author says 15 to 60 tickets work best, especially ones full of comments, arguments and oddly specific details.

Under the hood, Claude first reads the whole backlog and invents the station, its crew and its AI, then writes a short script for each log. Coworkers keep their real names and jobs, and the bots that comment on tickets become the station AI. ElevenLabs voices the characters and makes the sound effects, and the game itself is a static three.js site with no server.

Your permanently burning sprint finally has a genre, and it is horror.