The best IT game experience with Apollo IT

Are you looking for a solid IT game to help train your team, empower professional development with a bit of fun, or test your own IT chops? If so, you are in the right place! 

Atera’s new Apollo IT game offers all that and more by harnessing the power of AI in an interactive gaming experience that responds to your ideas. It is an excellent, inventive tool that allows you to test out IT strategies without the high stakes of real-world challenges in the workplace. 

When we say “IT game,” we don’t mean a board game, or strategic chess, or poker bluffing. Apollo IT is a completely online game, powered by futuristic AI capabilities, featuring you as the IT hero. 

In this article, we’ll give you a walkthrough of the game objectives, mechanics, and more — and by the end, you’ll be signing up and playing to win!  

Understanding the Apollo IT game

The setting: outer space.

The premise: a team of “cosmic adventurers” are heading home from an intergalactic journey when a meteor crashes their celestial party. They need help from an IT pro (like you) to help them work through various obstacle and save the day! 

The players: You are the IT specialist and your job is to chat with the “spacecraft pilot”, the AI bot, to help solve a range of IT challenges.

Let’s do a run-through so you can get a feel for what to expect from Atera’s Apollo IT game.

First up, here’s what the IT game interface looks like:

Now it’s time for the first challenge: a malfunctioning printer. To solve it, you need to chat and interact with the spacecraft pilot. For instance, your first question is whether a ticket was submitted by the crew, which may provide helpful additional information about the problem: 

The “spacecraft pilot” (AKA, AI chatbot) quickly and smartly responds to your query, letting you know the crew is busy. Then, you suggest a network discovery scan, which generates another response from the pilot, as you can see in the screenshot above. The interactions continue until the IT problem is solved.

There are many more queries and responses, which we won’t share here — no spoilers! — you’ll have to complete it yourself. After solving the first challenge, you can move onto the next challenges, which become progressively more difficult. 

Now that you’ve got an idea of what the Apollo IT game is all about, you’re probably wondering, what’s the draw? 

Why IT professionals love Apollo IT

Well, first of all… it’s fun! Many seasoned IT pros have enjoyed taking part in our Apollo IT game. But that’s not all that the game offers. It’s also an incredible educational tool. As one user said on our community chat thread: 

“The [Apollo IT] game is a great training resource for techs to teach them outside the box thinking on real world issues without having to be dealing with a real issue.”

At Atera, we are focused on revolutionizing IT management and empowering professionals. That means providing resources to encourage our users to continue learning, growing, and developing their skills — and that is exactly what the Apollo IT game aims to do. 

Coupled with our extensive library of asynchronous resources (including blog posts, recorded webinars, knowledge base, and shared script library) as well as synchronous offerings such as 24/7 live support, virtual IT community, and live events, Apollo IT game is one of the many ways we empower IT teams to shine in their careers. 

The role of gamification in IT education

An IT game is going to be fun for IT professionals, that’s a no-brainer! 

But you might be wondering if there are any workplace benefits that come with it. The answer is a resounding, YES!

It turns out that gamification in education has been long studied and proven effective — and Apollo IT taps into that power, providing an opportunity to make IT learning and development enjoyable.

As recently as 2023, Harvard Business School conducted a study with KPMG employees to determine if gamifying training would help with retention and engagement. The findings? Gamification improved business outcomes by 25% and enhanced engagement, motivation, and learning retention for employees. 

These benefits are reflected in similar studies across numerous industries, particularly in the IT industry. Gamified experiences like Apollo IT incorporate game-based design elements and tactics into training programs, including points, badges, challenges, and more, making the experience more exciting and effective. 

With Apollo IT, the unique space-themed IT game structure challenges users to earn prizes and rewards (and of course bragging rights!), which promotes super-engagement. After playing Apollo IT, IT pros have seen improvement in knowledge retention and skill development, while having a whole load of fun.

Innovation is the backbone of IT…

…and at Atera, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Our AI-powered IT game, Apollo IT, is capitalizing on the benefits of gamification in IT education and engagement. It’s a powerful tool to improve the skill and knowledge of your IT department, with fun and engaging challenges. But Apollo IT is not the only AI-driven advancement that we’ve been working on recently. 

We unveil brand-new innovations at our feature showcase, and engage in disruptive, challenging, and enlightening conversations about the future of AI in IT and our world.