Would you like to face a gaming challenge every time you start up your computer? If you answered in the affirmative, then Alejandro Armas, AKA mycroftsnm on GitHub, has a treat for you. The Linux enthusiast has created a quintet of UEFI games with the premise of “Win -> Boot, Lose -> Shutdown.” Head on over to the UEFIGame repository on GitHub (h/t Hackaday) and you will find five games to provide a PC booting gaming challenge.
Armas appears to have been working on this compendium of UEFI games for approximately 10 months. The games offer a mix of challenges spanning quiz-style games, a Simon-like challenge, and even a vertical scroller to make sure your reaction times are up to speed before you access your computer.
- User Evaluation for Ineptness challenges the user to add two random numbers from 0 to 99. “If your answer is incorrect, the system mocks you and shuts down,” says Armas.
- Insult Sword Fighting is a Monkey Island-inspired diversion. Users are asked to choose the correct comeback to continue booting. You can manually edit insults.txt to expand the scope of this UEFI game.
- Fall To Boot presents the user with a “vertical scrolling procedurally generated tunnel,” and Armas underlines that you will have to “reach the bottom, or you'll Fail to Boot.” Failure is caused in this game if your star-like cursor hits the tunnel walls during its rapid descent.
- Age Verification is a Leisure Suit Larry-inspired 80s pop culture trivia quiz. Due to the subject matter, this kind of filters out those “too young” to use the computer, snarks the Linux enthusiast dev.
- Lastly, there is the UEFI Says game, which is another graphical, rather than text-based title. UEFI says it is “a memory test... but not for the computer,” quips Armas. Again, you must succeed at this pattern-matching game to boot your computer.
You can see videos of some of these games in action if you head to GitHub and expand the Demo videos section.
UEFI games?
These games can run directly from a PCs Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) at boot. Many people still refer to the PC’s UEFI as the BIOS, as they basically do the same job of betting your system ready to boot into an operating system. UEFI is just the modern, modular, more secure and flexible successor to the BIOS.
Armas’ compendium of games aren’t the first UEFI gaming apps we’ve featured. They are kind of unique, though, as they offer a fun boot-time challenge. Back in October 2025 we wrote about the retro-licious Zaxxon recreation in UEFI, by Inkbox Software.
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