So where some companies might meet a deadline by hiring more employees or implementing crunch hours, NURV is stuck crafting schemes to plagiarize these super coders’ work. Winston tells Milo there are 20 people in the world capable of finishing Synapse on time, and he’s one of them. Unfortunately, good software developers are also incredibly rare in Antitrust’s world. Killing people is apparently easier than hiring some good antitrust lawyersĪntitrust’s conceit is that NURV is on its way to becoming the most powerful tech company in history (including Microsoft, which canonically exists in this universe), yet it’s so afraid of antitrust regulators that it will carry out elaborate and deadly heists to avoid officially acquiring a competitor, despite having already infiltrated the government agency responsible for investigating antitrust claims. Then, Winston starts feeding the design team some brilliant code… and programmers outside the company, including one of Milo’s friends, start dying. And while all these characteristics might work to its advantage, it’s also gratuitously, impractically, and sometimes counterproductively into murder.Īs Milo starts work on Synapse, he realizes the project is way behind schedule and working on an incredibly tight deadline. It’s a generic Silicon Valley super corporation that controls the flow of information and keeps invasive surveillance dossiers on its employees. It’s a monopolistic, anti-open-source conglomerate like Microsoft. NURV - an acronym for “Never Underestimate Radical Vision,” pronounced “nerve,” like the sinister task force in Neon Genesis Evangelion - is enthusiastically running a triathlon of evil. It might be more accurate to say that NURV is successful despite being badly criminal. But Howitt describes Antitrust as playing to our even darker collective suspicions about modern capitalism where “we think there must be some bodies buried somewhere.” The fictionalized Microsoft in ‘Antitrust’ is deeply criminal, but it’s not very good at itĭirector Peter Howitt has said Antitrust was inspired by the “part of us wants to believe you can’t be that successful without being really badly criminal.” To be sure, Microsoft was on trial for doing something illegal.

Monopoly tycoon trailer