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"Terrible games" made with AI [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-10-12  

Last week, a clone of Adobe's Creative Suite appeared, said to be reverse-engineered and recreated using AI. Adobe's bad reputation made it easy for the internet to take perverse joy in its misfortune. Out with Adobe's surveillance technology, in with a fast and efficient replacement! Just a little use of the clone apps, though, revealed weird bugs, just as you'd expect from vibe-coded software. If ArtCraft presents a threat to the company's "lower-end customer base, including students and freelancers," the business problem seems to be one of investors perceptions; revenues remain stellar.

For indie game devs, though, where success calls for clever ideas and endless labor on platforms that prioritize constant publicity and engagement, vibe-coded knockoffs and pre-emptive clones are a more alarming threat.

Earlier this year, an indie developer posted a 50-second clip of a cool game idea they had been thinking about for a long time. What if Tetris, but the board rotated as you added blocks? It was a neat idea that went viral on social media. But within a few days of posting the video, Freya Holmér discovered someone had created a clone of her idea using AI-coding tools. And then another vibe-coded clone appeared in app stores. And then more. This is the new reality for indie devs, one which might cost them a lot of money and could lead to people being less open with their ideas.

Wired's Boone Ashworth took a look at Google's new AI Playground, presented by the company as a place to crank this sort of thing out fast: "If you can think it, you can play it," goes the platform's tagline. It joins Horizon Create, Meta's recently-announced AI game extruder, among the new generation of "video game slop mines," Ashworth writes.

Ashworth prompted it with indie-coded ideas (Tetris but with pigs; gay dinner party; cyberpunk but it's a rhythm game) and it made them. But the games were not good: "Playground is fun for a bit. But soon it becomes pretty clear it's AI slop all the way down. Tell that to your ex-wife's lawyer."

The process of making a game is very straightforward, conversational, and responsive. That means it is perfect for dummies like me with little to no video game development chops or even decent coding skills. By simply throwing out some ideas, I built three playable, stable, and not even remotely good games in one day.

If one defense is "apps/games run on servers, your machine is just a display and control terminal," that's a pretty grim future—and doesn't help with the idea copycats, only the code cloners.

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