From College Dorm to 20 Million Rounds: Pax Historia’s Alt History Game

Eli Bullock-Papa and Ryan Zhang were freshman-year roommates at Virginia Tech when they entered a hackathon with a wild idea: what if you could rewrite history, and AI made the world actually respond back? Not scripted responses. Not branching dialogue trees.

That hackathon project became Pax Historia, a sandbox game where players create custom maps and timelines. Players can take actions (‘invade Greenland’) and engage in diplomatic chats (‘let's start a free trade agreement!’) to explore history or alternate universes.

AI controls how other countries react. Every single turn requires inference. Invade France in 1943? The AI decides how Britain, the Soviet Union, and a dozen other nations respond. Multiply that by 35k daily players, and you've got a serious infrastructure challenge for a team that started with zero budget.

OpenRouter has helped fill the gap. Pax Historia is able to offer dozens of AI models to players without doing manual labor to integrate each one — slashing development time. Players are then able to pick from 28+ AI models to optimize the kind of quality and pricepoint they want to play at.

Today, Pax Historia routes through 7+ AI providers via OpenRouter. They've routed 4.87 million requests through OpenRouter over the last month alone.