About
Most games want your evening. This one wants two to five minutes of your morning, for years.
Where it started
Bradley is Trail Running NZ: the news, the race calendar, the directory of who does what, the challenges. He had an idea about a race you read rather than watch. Pick a line, live with it, find out at the finish whether you were brave or just stubborn. He wrote it down as a choose-your-own-adventure with hidden stats and a swollen river in it.
Tom builds things at Molehill Creations, and had been carrying a different idea for a while: a runner who keeps training while the app is shut, on a real calendar, in a real region, with a day job paying for the shoes.
The two turned out to be one game from either end. Bradley's is the teaser, a full Western States in about ten minutes. Tom's is the world, the part with the tight calf and the race you entered in March and the ground somebody took off you on a Tuesday. Everything in between has been a rabbit hole, and there have been more of them than either of us expected.
The shape of it
Midpack Hero is a slow game. You check it the way you'd check on something alive: briefly, often, with a little dread. A ping lands halfway through a meeting. A piece of ground's gone, your calf's tight, it's race week, and you feel something before you've even opened the app. That feeling is the whole game.
You get one runner, and you look in on them every day. That's what makes them yours. Football Manager's depth, a tamagotchi's grip, and a choose-your-path race day when the training finally gets spent.
Promises
Some lines we hold, written down so you can hold us to them:
The game is free, and nothing in it costs real money. The purse buys kit, race entries, a look and a physio. It never buys a stat, a result or luck. Shoes, poles, a head torch and gels only stop the world charging you a penalty. A race entry buys a number and a place on the start line, and that's the lot. A physio can clear a niggle, but a strain or an injury heals on time alone. Nothing for sale makes your runner faster than their training did.
Standing orders, race plans and anything else that keeps your runner moving while you're busy are free, and always will be. We will never sell you back your own absence.
One at a time, not a stable to churn through. The game is built around the years you and one athlete put in together.
Your runner only gets injured carrying load you were warned about. Gear only fails after telling you it was failing. The one big thing left to a dice roll is a mountain route beyond your experience, and the board warns you about that before you go. If something goes properly wrong, there was a ping you chose to ignore. We'd argue that's the authentic trail running experience.
The field keeps training with the app shut. Come back from a month away and your runner is slower, but never slower than the day you started. Fitness to win back, never a runner to bury.
Who's behind it
Two people in Wellington, New Zealand, who between them have run these hills and had this ground taken off them. The trails in the game are the trails out the window. The weather in the game is fetched off the real forecast every morning, which we thought was a nice touch until the first winter.
Where it's up to
One region, a handful of real races on a real calendar, mountain routes in the Tararuas, a board of ground anybody can add to, and the two of us doing it in the evenings. It's still being built, so things will change under you and something will break at some point. When it does, that's our fault, not yours.