Tom Clancy’s ruthless.com 
It’s almost beyond parody. Tom Clancy’s ruthless.com.
Towards the end of the 90s, Red Storm Entertainment, a game studio founded by nationalistic spy novel purveyor Tom Clancy, made a strategy game about the future of corporate warfare in cyberspace. In the not-too-distant, post-Y2K future, every megacorporation is a software company. If you’re not a business executive, you’re either a hacker, a lawyer, or a hitman.
Obviously, that’s not what happened in the year 2000, and yes, it’s funny to look back at what pop culture got wrong about the future. The reason ruthless.com‘s vision of the cyber-future is so interesting – besides the game’s over-the-top, cyber-industrial theme – is because the game is incredibly vague and evasive on details. You run a company that makes technology. Your chief exports are Ideas and Products. Put that side-by-side with a business game like Capitalism, which breaks down the entire production chain and unit costs for real-world products like cars and laundry detergent, and ruthless.com looks downright abstract by comparison.
For Red Storm Entertainment, this vaguely defined futuristic setting was a great excuse to create a wild, free-ranging war game that loosely resembles what it would be like to run a giant corporation with the power of a nation-state. But the game is vague for a reason! As the title of the game suggests, ruthless.com is inspired by the sense of futurism that came out of the late 90s at the start of the dot-com bubble, an era filled with empty promises about technology and business, a few years before the realities of both would come to pass. » Read more about Tom Clancy’s ruthless.com