Blue Screen
Cases unlock in order, like levels. This is case 5 of 100.
Pulsar, Vila Olímpia, São Paulo, 8:00 am. On the eve of the startup's app launch, the team arrived and found the servers on a blue screen: the code and every backup had been wiped.
At 7:00 am, rival Vértice launched an identical app, bugs included. The logs show the wipe at 11:05 pm last night, run from the console inside the server room.
Three people knew that room from the inside. One of them handed two years of work to the competition.
Pulsar's glass-walled meeting room, the launch sticky notes still on the wall.
Suspects
Bruna CastroChief technology officer, 34
Diego TanakaTesting intern, 21
Rafael MouraCo-founder, 39
The real case
Waymo v. Uber and the Anthony Levandowski case
United States, 2016 to 2021
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Anthony Levandowski was one of the engineers who built Google's self-driving car project, later called Waymo. Before leaving the company in 2016, he copied about 14,000 internal files. He founded a self-driving truck startup that Uber bought months later, and went on to lead the rival's autonomous vehicle program.
Waymo sued Uber in 2017 for theft of trade secrets; the 2018 settlement gave Waymo a stake in Uber valued at about 245 million dollars. Levandowski pleaded guilty to a criminal charge in 2020 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, a sentence pardoned by the President of the United States in 2021.
The game borrows the figure of the trusted technician who takes the company's code to a rival in exchange for a partnership. Characters, setting, crime and outcome are fiction.
Sources
Case glossary
Words from this case you might not know.
- Vila Olímpia
- A business district in São Paulo, Brazil, known for office towers and many technology companies.