Someone didn't know how to use the remaining credits.
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
The heavy lifting was done by Opus. I wouldn't burn precious soon-to-be-departing Fable usage on this!
andrew_ocs•Jul 13, 2026
I wouldnt be so sure Fable wouldnt just refuse to do this
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
I mean, technically, "I selected Fable for this task" and "Opus did the heavy lifting" aren't mutually exclusive statements...?
forestingfisher•Jul 13, 2026
Can’t believe this doesn’t already exist.
dhg72•Jul 13, 2026
There are plenty of critiques of the AI labs but it's a bit ironic leveling criticism in a game which was obviously one-shotted by their models and which would never have been made without AI
androiddrew•Jul 13, 2026
A model harness can launch a bagillion sub agents and we still call it one shotting.
zahlman•Jul 13, 2026
... And why shouldn't we? The system still responded to a single prompt, and we still took its first submitted candidate.
ipsum2•Jul 13, 2026
That's part of the joke.
gordon_freeman•Jul 13, 2026
who needs this AI-genrated game for real though? Would not I rather play the real Mario instead? this is clearly part of the joke!
croes•Jul 13, 2026
Fighting them with their own weapons isn’t ironic it’s poetic justice
Numbers look bigger when multiplied by one thousand
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
Grab that coin and you'll get there!
dude250711•Jul 13, 2026
Like political satire, only in IT.
goldenarm•Jul 13, 2026
Funny idea but wow the gameplay is terrible and full of bugs. Bad hitboxes, shells that bounce in front of holes, bad physics.
AI still cannot oneshot 2D platformers, the most documented videogame genre with so much source code available.
slopinthebag•Jul 13, 2026
Not to mention it feels like 30hz on my 120hz monitor. It's actually impressive how it managed to mess that up.
But yeah guys, AI sure will be writing all the code just give it another 6 months...
tavavex•Jul 13, 2026
It feels like each new SOTA model brings the average quality a bit closer to the asymptote of well-made non-vibecoded software but it can't quite cross it.
nsxwolf•Jul 13, 2026
Just amazing how right a few people at Nintendo got this in 1985, and its still so easy to get it absolutely wrong.
reactordev•Jul 13, 2026
Nintendo wasn’t even trying, it was all their old sprite characters from Japan market that didn’t do well smashed together in a rushed title for an NA launch. It surprised them.
Wowfunhappy•Jul 13, 2026
Huh? This is very much not my understanding of SMB1’s development. Are you maybe thinking of Donkey Kong (made to replace a failed arcade game) and/or the US version of SMB2 (a re-skinned non-Mario Japanese game)?
reactordev•Jul 13, 2026
Nope, SMB1 was a smash up. SMB2 was made by folks that had no idea what they were doing so SMB3 went back to basics. I very much remember the sequence of events. Mario Bro's (and Donkey Kong) were games on the Famicom in Japan that were decent. The issue was with Arcade's in Japan making more money than home systems so they introduced the Nintendo VS cabinets. This helped but it wasn't enough and so in 1985 they greenlit the Super Mario Bros proposal while dealing with the NA launch and the NYC event. Shigeru Miyamoto carried the development and he deserves the credit but corporate was throwing shit at the fan and seeing what sticked. He just so happened to have a plan that required less work from creative.
uncivilized•Jul 13, 2026
Any links to read more about this?
reactordev•Jul 13, 2026
Most of it has been lost to internet history but there are still some remnants left.
Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken many times about the process of perfecting the controls for SMB, which is quite the opposite of "wasn't even trying".
reactordev•Jul 13, 2026
Oh he absolutely cared about the programming and process of game development, don't get me wrong. It's that Nintendo (corporate) needed something for the NA market and he was eager to fill that gap with already used characters (such as Mario). Anything else is corporate propaganda they have been telling as a creation myth to make it sound more fairytale-like than it was. They were going broke. They needed money. North America was ripe for the picking. The risk paid off.
input_sh•Jul 13, 2026
On the "bright side", it's impossible to die!
disillusioned•Jul 13, 2026
That's the power of venture capital!
miyoji•Jul 13, 2026
This was my favorite bit of meta-commentary: it doesn't matter how poorly you play, you never lose!
kridsdale1•Jul 13, 2026
Even survived the Hegseth Bullet Bill attack
thisisit•Jul 13, 2026
More like keeps "extending by 1 more week"
mkagenius•Jul 13, 2026
you mean amodei
zahlman•Jul 13, 2026
It seems that you do lose a life when hit by an enemy or falling in a pit, but the latter freezes until you click the toggle sound button, and running out of lives resets the counter to 3 and halves your "valuation".
reactordev•Jul 13, 2026
You’re absolutely right! /s
vunderba•Jul 13, 2026
Yep. Additionally having experimented pretty heavily in this space, I'll state that even with state-of-the-art models (like NB Pro or GPT-Image-2), good luck getting them to generate sprite sheets with consistent frames for animation particularly if you're shooting for a pixel art aesthetic.
I've made a few sprite-based animations with AI assistance but it still required a fair amount of manual photoshop (or in my case Aseprite) post-processing.
nananana9•Jul 13, 2026
If you're not going for pixel art, use the video to video models (the character swap ones that take in a video reference of the animation and a still of the character (the tiktok deepfake models)).
You can e.g. download a run cycle from Mixamo, use Blender to render a video from whatever angle you wish, and feed that into the model along with your sprite on a green background, it's pretty much perfect.
vunderba•Jul 13, 2026
Thanks for the info! I'll give this a shot. Most of my knowledge is from over a year ago, when I would set up OpenPose-style positioning with a controlnet at a high strength to guide an image-to-image workflow in comfyui. But it was pretty tedious and prone to errors.
throwthrowuknow•Jul 13, 2026
It’s a tough problem but Retro Diffusion is making some incredible progress
Nice. I need to go check them out again. I really liked their original Retro Diffusion models but this a while back in the SDXL days. It felt like it was trained on more natural language, so prompting it was quite nice for that era.
But if they’ve been working on it specifically for animation, that’s pretty neat.
dvt•Jul 13, 2026
One-shotting is a bit of a red herring, imo. Let's say I wanted to build a "Super Dario" meme platformer. I would do some research, find a platformer on Codepen or Github that "feels" good, tweak it to my liking, change the sprites, and voila.
I constantly have to tell agents to just "look it up online" and "don't hallucinate your own components" because people have already done this a million times. Ironically, being more lazy could make these models more useful.
bogwog•Jul 13, 2026
So you're saying that it's not fair to rate a coding model on its ability to code, and instead the best way to use it is to tell it to find existing human-written code online rather than generate actual code on its own?
darkwater•Jul 13, 2026
Isn't part of the human coding that Super Dario tells us LLM are going to replace also made of what you are saying GP is saying?
dvt•Jul 13, 2026
If you're testing how good LLMs are at compressing information, then I think that's a fair test. Personally, I don't really think that's where their strength comes from (especially considering how much more useful local models that are orders of magnitude smaller than Claude/OpenAI-tier models have gotten). In other words, we already have a "super-intelligence"—it's called the internet, so just use the darn thing.
tripleee•Jul 13, 2026
It's not a bad idea, to be honest.
Thinking about it now you could probably get even better quality if you pre-write the code yourself and hand it to the LLM. That way it outputs exactly what you want.
sefrost•Jul 13, 2026
Yes for any slightly non-standard web UI components I either tell the LLM to search the web and find examples or I provide them myself.
Usually the ones I provide myself are better than the ones they find themselves.
I'm not super clear how they search the web or what they do and don't have access to. It seems to be quite fast.
jimkleiber•Jul 13, 2026
TBH, I wonder how much one-shotting posts are just lying about one-shotting it.
uncivilized•Jul 13, 2026
Many for sure.
micromacrofoot•Jul 13, 2026
I think that supports the premise more than it defies it
boutell•Jul 13, 2026
Strong agree. Very much part of the joke.
uncivilized•Jul 13, 2026
I don’t know if it’s showcasing that AI is still that bad, or if it’s purposely built to be this bad in a funny type of way.
mrkeen•Jul 13, 2026
This game was so good, it's as if the developer was given a team of PhD-level experts to work on it.
Waterluvian•Jul 13, 2026
Haters will suggest AI built this, but I can personally tell there’s at least a kilomolyneux (approx. 55 centikojimas) of PhD-level game dev expertise involved.
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
Okay, so, maker here!
I was expecting this to drown in the flood of /newest, so seeing so many folks get a chuckle out of this is a very pleasant surprise. The obvious spark for this was yesterday's second last-minute extension of the Fable promotional window (a phrase comprised of two heavily strained words at this point), and an hour or so of back-and-forth with GLM-5.2 and Opus later, here we are.
The game is, of course, unwinnable on purpose. There is no ending. The flag always escapes, the date always extends, and new GPT releases will continue to wipe your valuation no matter how many coins or funding round power-ups you collect. The win condition is closing the tab because you're tired of it, which I'd argue makes it the most realistic AI-industry simulation currently available on the internet.
The code is, of course, vibe-slopped, most of the imagery is original human-slop (or sourced from icon libraries). Happy to answer any and all questions and take any and all flak. The bugs are a part of the joke, I swear!
humam_alhusaini•Jul 13, 2026
This is great lol
Can you release a version playable on mobile?
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
Yeah, on it right now! Should be up within the hour.
edit: It's up!
kylehotchkiss•Jul 13, 2026
Level 10 government subsidy invincible mode
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
gotta save some ideas for the sequel
frankdenbow•Jul 13, 2026
well done, got a good laugh out of this one.
Cider9986•Jul 13, 2026
No mobile support.
parl_match•Jul 13, 2026
Thanks for your contribution.
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
On-screen controls are live!
m132•Jul 13, 2026
Now all that's missing is being able to move and jump at once
sherlock-holmes•Jul 13, 2026
incredible
salahadawi•Jul 13, 2026
New Gemini model! Nobody cares.
With the Gemini power-up falling off the screen got a chuckle out of me
mchusma•Jul 13, 2026
This was my favorite as well.
kaeruct•Jul 13, 2026
Why do the coins spin faster when I move?
kridsdale1•Jul 13, 2026
Momentum. And / or Special Relativity.
sajithdilshan•Jul 13, 2026
The game is really cool, but I'm a bit dissapoint by the music. I want the original them song. Also the fact that the game is never ending bothers my OCD
dancemethis•Jul 13, 2026
I mean, Sam should be more of a ghoul with those creepy sunken eyes. And Dario that guy with hair on the sides.
meken•Jul 13, 2026
The music reminds me of Mappy Land (one of my favorite childhood games).
Desktop Safari 18.6 / Mac: Nice, but none of the text on the signs are readable. Just appears as unreadable dots. Also the music doesn't work on Safari.
Firefox works great!
thepasch•Jul 13, 2026
Agh, sorry about that. I had no Mac around to test this on, though I might be able to get one by proxy. I'll try to get it fixed.
kridsdale1•Jul 13, 2026
Same bug in iOS 27 chrome.
aliasxneo•Jul 13, 2026
Wow, my entire feelings on this series of events summed up in a single game. Extra rich its vibe coded. We need more of this.
clutter55561•Jul 13, 2026
This wins the internet this week!
jdw64•Jul 13, 2026
After playing this game, I think it's time to launch 'vibe game design.' Now that the code is solved, it's time to release 'vibe game design,' 'vibe music design,' and 'vibe control design' for serious game design
danielrmay•Jul 13, 2026
For all of the advertising of GPT 5.6 in this charming little game, the chatgpt.com UI has failed to load in the past several hours for me
geoffbp•Jul 13, 2026
Open source it? :-)
nico•Jul 13, 2026
Omg, so funny! I can’t believe I played this for like 5 min straight
34 Comments
Good thing I have a day job. Where I don't use AI.
https://claude.com/community#:~:text=What,Claude%3F
AI still cannot oneshot 2D platformers, the most documented videogame genre with so much source code available.
But yeah guys, AI sure will be writing all the code just give it another 6 months...
https://grantland.com/features/the-rise-of-nintendo-video-ga...
https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/0/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w1zl4/when_...
I've made a few sprite-based animations with AI assistance but it still required a fair amount of manual photoshop (or in my case Aseprite) post-processing.
You can e.g. download a run cycle from Mixamo, use Blender to render a video from whatever angle you wish, and feed that into the model along with your sprite on a green background, it's pretty much perfect.
https://retrodiffusion.ai/
But if they’ve been working on it specifically for animation, that’s pretty neat.
I constantly have to tell agents to just "look it up online" and "don't hallucinate your own components" because people have already done this a million times. Ironically, being more lazy could make these models more useful.
Thinking about it now you could probably get even better quality if you pre-write the code yourself and hand it to the LLM. That way it outputs exactly what you want.
Usually the ones I provide myself are better than the ones they find themselves.
I'm not super clear how they search the web or what they do and don't have access to. It seems to be quite fast.
I was expecting this to drown in the flood of /newest, so seeing so many folks get a chuckle out of this is a very pleasant surprise. The obvious spark for this was yesterday's second last-minute extension of the Fable promotional window (a phrase comprised of two heavily strained words at this point), and an hour or so of back-and-forth with GLM-5.2 and Opus later, here we are.
The game is, of course, unwinnable on purpose. There is no ending. The flag always escapes, the date always extends, and new GPT releases will continue to wipe your valuation no matter how many coins or funding round power-ups you collect. The win condition is closing the tab because you're tired of it, which I'd argue makes it the most realistic AI-industry simulation currently available on the internet.
The code is, of course, vibe-slopped, most of the imagery is original human-slop (or sourced from icon libraries). Happy to answer any and all questions and take any and all flak. The bugs are a part of the joke, I swear!
Can you release a version playable on mobile?
edit: It's up!
Firefox works great!
Are those little Sam Altmans?!
Love the power ups: tokenmaxxing, usage reset