RELAY - Retro Chat

A chat room that remembers only what fits on screen. Everything older dissolves, for good. Now with themes, wallpapers and a pixel-art shooter hiding on the desktop.

RELAY is a chat app that forgets.

Every conversation keeps only the messages that fit inside its window. Whatever scrolls past the top corrupts, dissolves and is wiped from the server. Not hidden. Not archived. Gone. If you weren't there, you missed it — the way conversation worked before everything became a permanent record.

It looks like an app running inside an operating system that no longer exists. Windows with bevelled edges, a taskbar, a desktop with icons you can drag around, and a chat that behaves like the IRC clients of the late nineties: nicknames in colour, a user list you can call up, channel operators, and slash commands for people who remember them.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• Public channels and private ones, opened with a channel key • Direct messages • Nicknames that belong to you until you change them • The full IRC hierarchy: owner, admin, operator, half-operator, voice • Commands: /op /kick /nick /query /me /ignore and the rest • A desktop with a paint program, a scores file, and a folder of games

THE DESKTOP

Because the app pretends to be an operating system, it came with an operating system's furniture. There's a paint program with a spray can. There's a folder with minesweeper, a ski run with something hunting you, solitaire, and a brick breaker with ten levels. There's a file that keeps your high scores — the one thing in RELAY that is allowed to remember.

BOOM.EXE

Hidden on the desktop is a first-person shooter in the shape of the ones that came on shareware discs. Textured walls, a shotgun, eight demons and a lever that ends the level. Sold separately, once, forever.

SEVENTEEN LOOKS

Every theme re-tints and re-fonts the entire app — a Windows 9x chat client, an amber terminal, a green phosphor screen, a Workbench desktop, a teletext page, a 1-bit black and white machine that turns the games monochrome too. Two are free. The rest, and the wallpapers, can be bought one at a time or all at once.

WHAT'S FREE, WHAT'S NOT

RELAY is free to download, and everything you need to chat is included: public and private channels, direct messages, all four base games, two themes and the default look. The following are optional, one-time in-app purchases — never required to use the app:

• Extra themes (16 more), one at a time or all at once in a bundle
• Extra wallpapers and screen savers
• BOOM.EXE, the shooter

No subscriptions. Anything you buy is yours forever.

PRIVACY, NOT AS A FEATURE BUT AS A SHAPE

You sign in with Apple and we never ask for your name or your email. Your profile is a nickname. Your messages delete themselves. There is no advertising, no analytics, and nothing to sell, because there is nothing kept.

It's a chat room. It's the size of a window. Then it's gone.