---
layout: post
title: "Flyiverse: a field guide to the fly brain’s strange internet life"
date: 2026-09-10
published: true
image: /images/posts/flyiverse-home-above-fold-2026-09-10.png
image_alt: "Above the fold of the Flyiverse homepage: an illustrated fly beside the headline Scientists mapped a fly’s nervous system. Then somebody plugged it into Doom."
image_link: https://flyiverse.com
description: "A field guide to the games, desktop pets, and other strange experiments built around fruit-fly connectomes."
---

A fly’s nervous system gets mapped by researchers. And somehow, someone looks at the wiring diagram and asks the eternal question - can it play Doom?

Then can it run [Snake](https://flyiverse.com/projects/fly-brain-snake/)? Can [it](https://flyiverse.com/projects/desktop-fly/) walk around your Mac desktop? What, exactly, is the “fly” in each of these projects?

I made [Flyiverse](https://flyiverse.com) to help myself understand the landscape, and also because these experiments were oddly hard to find in one place. Also it was a great opportunity to test out Astra's visual design chops.

Flyiverse is a [101 to fruit flies](https://flyiverse.com/fruit-fly-101/) and a field guide to the weird little projects built around fruit-fly connectomes: games, desktop pets, virtual bodies, art, scientific models, and the ports that grow around them. The first edition has 37 primary projects and six related ports.

## Connectomes

A connectome is a map of which nerve cells connect. You can simulate with it. It does not come with a body, a visual system, a controller, or instructions for playing a game. Builders have to make choices about all of that: how game frames become signals, how simulated cells behave, and which signals turn into left, right, jump, or fire.

Take [DOOMFLY](https://flyiverse.com/projects/doomfly/). Its repository connects a retained [MaleCNS](https://flyiverse.com/projects/malecns/) wiring graph to a fixed set of Doom controls.

[DesktopFly](https://flyiverse.com/projects/desktop-fly/) is another favorite. It puts a 3D fly on a desktop and describes modeled senses, joints, and behavior alongside [FlyWire](https://flyiverse.com/projects/flywire/) and [MaleCNS](https://flyiverse.com/projects/malecns/) wiring. The result is charming. It is also an engineered creature with explicit bridges between different data and body layers, not a reconstructed fly wandering around your windows.

The underlying work is extraordinary: the researchers, annotators, engineers, and communities behind [FlyWire](https://flyiverse.com/projects/flywire/), [MaleCNS](https://flyiverse.com/projects/malecns/), and related connectomics projects made this whole strange corner of the internet possible.

A few more fun projects in the same vein:

- [FlyTris](https://flyiverse.com/projects/flytris/) — a connectome-constrained mushroom body takes on Tetris.
- [Fly64](https://flyiverse.com/projects/fly-mario/) — a MaleCNS model wired into Super Mario 64.
- [Help the Fly Escape](https://flyiverse.com/projects/fly-escape/) — rearrange a tiny house and see which simulated flies find the exit.
- [FLY / MINE](https://flyiverse.com/projects/fly-minesweeper/) — Minesweeper logic repurposed through traced MaleCNS neurons.
- [FLYBOARD](https://flyiverse.com/projects/flyboard-music/) — a whole fly CNS listens for the pulse inside pop songs.
- [making-fly-play-chess](https://flyiverse.com/projects/making-fly-play-chess/) — a frozen fly-connectome reservoir gives chess positions a strange second opinion.
- [TalkingFly](https://flyiverse.com/projects/talking-fly/) — an olfactory subgraph sniffs a molecule, then a local language model gives it a voice.

Here's [flyiverse](https://flyiverse.com)