Internet Cafe Tycoon

Internet Cafe Tycoon puts you in charge of a 2000s internet cafe during a 30-day run. You seat customers, sell drinks, manage equipment and handle inspections and fights as you try to become Internet King. The game recreates the late-90s and 2000s cafe atmosphere, with CRT monitors, period posters, lo-fi music and customers using services such as Metin2, MSN and IRC.

Build and run the cafe

You begin with a shop key, a few PCs and one of three starting builds, each of which shapes the early game differently. Buy vending machines, replace ageing equipment, open the arcade hall and expand to 10 PCs for the evening rush. You can right-click items to check details such as what a customer wants, how much life a machine has left or what stock remains in a vending machine, while the cafe continues running.

Hire a ghost apprentice to carry orders and work the vending machines. After training, the apprentice can also fly over to break up fights. Three promotion tiers make them faster, and you can hire a second apprentice when the till allows. Each cafe also has a cat that you can name.

Manage customers and rules

Seat regulars, give VIPs special treatment and turn away underage customers before an inspector writes you up. Rival clans may start fighting if they have to wait side by side, damaging your reputation. At level 1, Cafe Rules lets you set policies such as closing vending machines or the arcade hall, refusing minors, turning groups away at the door or reserving the last desk for VIPs. Each restriction also costs you the money those customers might have spent.

Seven arcade cabinets

The arcade has seven playable mini-games: MAZE, FIGHT, STEEL BALL, RACE, SPACE DEFENSE, GUNNER and BEAT. Some customers want a PC, while others request a particular cabinet. Giving them the wrong cabinet earns half pay and leaves them disappointed; the right one earns full pay and can turn them into regulars. Cabinets store their takings in coin boxes, which you need to empty before they fill up and let customers play for free.

Daily events and mail

Each day brings problems and decisions, including blackouts, slow internet, virus outbreaks, city inspections, customer birthdays and pirated-software scares. After closing, you review mail in MAIL.EXE. Events can include a landlord offering a rent cut for paying up front, a nearby shop proposing three days of free tea, a visit from the city or the opening of a rival cafe. There are 29 different mail events, each with a sender, recipient and reply-by day. You can ignore an offer, but refusing it also has a cost; both sides are shown before you decide.

Levels and difficulty

The game has 20 levels and 23 perks. At each level, choose from the Common, Uncommon and Rare pools to suit your approach, such as building a fast-internet setup, growing a tip-fed business or using security to prevent fights.

Three difficulty settings change the challenge. Easy is focused on the atmosphere, and PCs never fail completely. Standard is the intended setting, while Challenger has tighter budgets, harsher reputation penalties and a costly weekly tax. If you get stuck, you can repair equipment on credit or use a free patch-up that restores a desk in damaged condition.

Save and cafe details

The game has five independent save slots that mirror to Steam Cloud, allowing you to run multiple cafes side by side. Its visuals include CRT scanlines and pixel art with individual customer walk cycles; the daytime lo-fi soundtrack becomes livelier after you buy a music system.