U.S. federal income taxes are due on April 18, and if you haven’t already filed, you have an exciting new option: Tax Heaven 3000, an anime-style visual novel/dating sim that will also help you file your tax return.
Tax Heaven 3000 stars Iris, a comely young woman who is definitely into you and into helping you prepare a United States federal income tax return. It’s for single filers without dependents, if you get what I’m saying. 😉 Tax Heaven 3000 appears to play like a standard dating sim, but you have to put your Social Security Number in, sharply increasing the player’s level of trust in the lovely Iris.
Developed by MSCHF — who also released Chair Simulator on Steam in 2021 — the creators describe what Tax Heaven 3000 is really all about in its product description:
Most wealthy countries make tax filing free, if the burden of preparation is even passed along to individuals at all. But, corporate tax filing services are (by dint of extensive lobbying) predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people.
And it works! The villainous corporation that controls the government from the shadows is a sadly mundane reality. It’s the most boring industry imaginable.
Videogames are, at the end of the day, pieces of software–ontologically akin to Microsoft Word. Tax Heaven 3000 simply makes the fiction the point. For some reason the game-to-real-life interface has tended to remain the purview of corporate metaverse fictions. Tax Heaven 3000 is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS.
Worried about giving someone other than the IRS, TurboTax, and/or various credit card companies your SSN? Don’t fret, MSCHF is legit. You know them. They made Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes. They made the Eat the Rich popsicles (edible versions of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.). They made the Big Fruit Loop. They even made those viral big red Astroboy boots.
Pricing for Tax Heaven 3000 hasn’t been announced, but given the message behind it (and Chair Simulator being free) expect it to cost nothing. Tax Heaven 3000 will be released on March 31 for Mac and Windows PC, giving U.S. taxpayers just a couple weeks to get to know Iris.
