Henry Cavill is building a 16-bit game on a Googlebook, and every play will fund Movember

Henry Cavill’s moustache has its own internet folklore, and now it has a video game. Google has started a three-part series in which the actor builds a retro 16-bit game called Mustache Protocol on a Googlebook, its new laptop line.

The plot is as silly as it sounds: rogue CGI artists are trying to wipe every moustache off the face of the planet, and the player has to stop them. According to Google’s blog, Cavill turned a napkin-level idea into game mechanics with Antigravity, the agent tool that writes code from plain-language prompts, and used Rambler, a speech-to-text tool, to tidy up his spoken brainstorming.

Other Googlebook features get their moment too. Magic Pointer let him pick and combine visual elements on screen while designing the hero, and Continue On moved his work between an Android phone and the laptop without losing his place. It is an ad, of course, but one with a playable result at the end rather than a montage of benchmarks.

The first episode is out, and later ones will cover the hero design, meme-inspired superpowers and the soundtrack. The game itself is not playable yet. Once it is, Google will give Movember $11 for every play from November 11 to 30, up to $500,000, for men’s mental health and cancer programmes.

Earlier we covered how Antigravity’s remote agents keep coding in the cloud after you close the laptop.

Reported by Google, Googlebook. Compiled with AI tools.