Chaos Overlords: New Chrome

Chaos Overlords is a turn-based gang war. You hire gangs, send them out into a cyberpunk city, and try to end up owning more of it than the other five overlords before the payroll bankrupts you. It came out in 1996, and the people who played it have been reinstalling it every few years since.

New Chrome is a rewrite of the game. It loads the art, audio and data tables from your copy of the original and runs them on its own engine, so it plays natively on Windows, Linux and macOS.

What works

You can play a full match in any of the ten original scenarios, against computer players, hot-seat, or online. Hiring, movement, combat, sector control, influence, research, bribes and upkeep follow the original rules as far as they have been recovered from the manual and the executable. Turns resolve deterministically, so a replay plays back the same game move for move. Online matches go through a separate coordination service.

What is missing

It does not yet match the 1996 build rule for rule or pixel for pixel. What the original does is written up in the repository’s spec, which follows the documentation standard, and the parity matrix says how much of each spec entry the rebuild does. In September 2026 it covered 222 rules, formats and screens: the code does all of 151 and part of 52, and none has yet been checked by an automated test against evidence from the original. The game is playable from setup to the end screen and has not reached 1.0.

Getting it running

1. Own the original. The GOG release is the easiest source.
2. Download the installer from GitHub Releases.
3. If setup does not find your install folder, point it there. It checks the original files and imports them locally. The original executable is never run.