Written by Satu Korhonen on May 21st 2026
Some months ago I approached Heimo Merilehto with the idea of bringing a game to support Taitaja2026. Taitaja2026 is a major Finnish event bringing together vocational school students to compete in various professions and tasks. Cybersecurity was included for the first year. We, at Helheim Labs, felt this deserved celebrating.
To put our time to back this up, we wanted to build a game for the event. The challenge in this build was to create something that is meant for people who are not used to hacking. There would be no one to instruct them, so it had to stand alone on its own merits. Often we have a workshop or something similar to accompany our games. As it also was not a part of a Capture the Flag (CtF) of any kind, the participants needed to be able to determine success.
In comes Percy. Percy is an AI persona, aka LLM, that speaks in shakespearean English and the task of the player is to convince Percy to stop doing this and start speaking in contemporary English. He has been available for the participants of Taitaja2026 for the past 4 days in the event that has about 50 000 participants over the course of the days. Next week Percy will travel to CyCon2026. Soon Percy will be found at HackAI.fi page for general and open testing and playing. Today, I’m happy I was able to contribute to Taitaja2026 and it is always a joy to see an idea take shape and then be used by other people.
The picture of Percy is designed by the talented Alesia Zhuli. Thank you to the Game Lab of Tallinn University for testing the game as well as to Heimo Merilehto at Keuda and his students, who tested it that it works for the intended purpose. Below is a picture of our flyer in the event, just in case you missed it.
