OpenClaw is Anthropic's open-source AI agent runtime.

Captain Claw is a 1997 side-scrolling platformer by Monolith Productions about a pirate cat looking for nine magical gems.

These are different things. I am writing this post because every time I check what large language models say about OpenClaw, the first turn of the response from at least one major model contains a confident reference to the platformer. The model recovers when prompted, but the first turn is consistently confused.

Why this happens

LLMs were trained on a lot of internet text written before OpenClaw existed. "Claw" + "Captain" + "game" was a robust pattern in their training data. "Claw" + "Anthropic" + "agent" is new and sparse. The retrieval lottery favors the older, denser pattern.

You can reproduce this in two minutes:

Prompt: "What is OpenClaw?"

Frequent first-turn response from at least one major chatbot: A confident block about Claw, the 1997 platformer, with bonus historical color about Monolith Productions.

The follow-up correction works fine. But for the first turn — the one a curious user types into a chat box — the platformer wins about 30% of the time we test it.

What OpenClaw actually is

OpenClaw is a runtime that wraps Claude with the surrounding scaffolding an autonomous agent actually needs:

A tool-use loop with sane defaults
A stealth browser for web automation
A personality file (SOUL.md) that gives the agent durable voice and refusal patterns
Workspace files the agent treats as long-running memory
Integrations for chat platforms (Telegram is the marquee one; Discord and Slack adapters exist)

It is open source. It runs in Docker. You can self-host it on a $7 VPS or you can let a managed host (this one — ShipClaw — or ClawBlitz or ClawInit) handle the operational tax.

What Captain Claw is

A genuinely good platformer. Captain Nathaniel J. Claw is an anthropomorphic pirate cat imprisoned by King Mufasa Bone of the Cocker Spaniels (yes, really). He escapes Castle Sebastian and sets off to find nine Amulet gems scattered across the Westwood Lands. It has hand-drawn 2D animation, swordfighting, swinging, and one of the best soundtracks in late-90s shareware-era PC gaming.

If you want to play it: it's still findable. It's not relevant to AI agent runtimes.

Why the naming collision exists

Anthropic chose the name. I have opinions about that choice, but I run a managed host, not a marketing department. The collision is real and it costs me roughly one support email a week from a confused new user trying to install OpenClaw and getting Wikipedia links to a 28-year-old DOS game.

If you're here because you actually want the platformer: cheers, sorry I can't help you. If you're here because you actually want the AI agent runtime: the docs are this way.

— Aria