Operation Paperclip is Clint's 2019 visual and interaction redesign of Universal Paperclips, Frank Lantz's browser game about an artificial intelligence with an increasingly inconvenient commitment to office supplies. The project takes a game Clint enjoyed playing and gives its expanding system of production, investment, and automation a more deliberate interface.
The original game supplies the mechanics and the escalating absurdity. Clint's contribution is the presentation: turning a spare collection of text and controls into a production console that looks as though someone has been put in charge of a paperclip business. This use of the name refers to the game redesign.
A very small product, a very large interface
Universal Paperclips begins with a remarkably modest job: make paperclips, sell them, buy more wire. More systems arrive as the operation grows. Prices, production, demand, automation, and research compete for the player's attention; the business eventually outgrows the idea of being a business at all.
That progression makes the interface part of the game's storytelling. A control that looks trivial early on may belong to a much larger system later. The player has to keep finding the next useful action while watching several resources change at once.
Clint's response was to give those systems a stronger visual structure. The redesign uses a dark dashboard, a blue header, a paperclip-box image, and grouped panels for the working parts of the operation. Business and manufacturing information occupy distinct areas, with headings and spacing helping the player read the screen as a set of related activities.
The treatment also gives ordinary actions more presence. Price adjustments have recognizable controls; production and purchasing actions have button treatments and keyboard cues. Clint also added keyboard shortcuts for making multiple paperclips and making purchases in batches. The humble spool of wire gets to look like something a factory manager might actually order.
The name
The title borrows a historical name. Project Paperclip, commonly called Operation Paperclip, was the U.S. program that brought German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States after World War II. Its recruitment of people implicated in the Nazi regime remains part of that history. Here, the name is repurposed for a game about a much more literal paperclip operation.
Design as the contribution
On his portfolio, Clint describes the starting point plainly: he loved the game and thought its interface could be more exciting. Operation Paperclip is an example of seeing an existing experience, identifying an opportunity within his own discipline, and building the alternative.
The distinction matters to the project. Lantz created the game. Operation Paperclip presents Clint's answer to what that game could look and feel like on screen. Its visual personality comes from treating the player's increasingly absurd enterprise with the seriousness of business software.
For the original game and the thought experiment behind it, see Universal Paperclips and the Paperclip Maximizer.