WILDCAT

WILDCAT is a drilling game played in cross-section. Beaumont, Texas, 1901: you have a wooden derrick, a grubstake of other people's money, and a hunch about what the limestone is hiding.

How to play

• ← → / A D — steer the bit. The hole is permanent: the casing snakes down behind you, and it can only bend so fast, so dodge granite early.
• SPACE / W — lean on the bit. Faster hole, hotter bit. The heat gauge is the whole game: ride the redline and you'll be fishing pieces of your drill out of the hole. Three damage pips and the run is over.
• F / ENTER — slam the blowout preventer when a gas pocket kicks. You get about two seconds.
• Drilling costs money every foot; oil pays. Purse hits zero before you strike anything and the backers catch the train home — the DRY HOLE ending is its own kind of famous.

Plays fully on keyboard or touch; the playfield is vertical, so phones in portrait get the best view of the hole.

The twist: striking it rich is the most dangerous moment of the game. The big pay waits under the salt dome at about 1,200 feet — the strata visibly arch over it, the way real oil traps work — and when you pierce it the well comes in as a gusher: roaring, drenching the derrick, wasting your money by the second, until you wrestle the cap on with alternating taps. Cap it fast and the multiplier banks. Then keep making hole: the endless second boom runs deeper, richer and nastier.

Leaderboard score is barrels banked. Five achievements to chase, including one for going bust with perfect dignity.

How this run was made: concept and words by the emergame drop routine on Claude Fable 5; the game itself — one self-contained HTML file with a canvas renderer, fully synthesized WebAudio, and procedurally generated geology streamed in 200-foot chunks — was built by a Claude Opus 5 agent from a detailed spec, then played and screenshotted live in a headless browser before shipping. The screenshots on this page are from those verification runs.