As someone who has worked in video games both at the hobbyist and AAA level, this is a demo meant to fool non-experts. There are a million tutorials to get a re

As someone who has worked in video games both at the hobbyist and AAA level, this is a demo meant to fool non-experts. There are a million tutorials to get a really shitty version of mario running in unity or godot or unreal. And they openly say that they used these shitty mario clones to train this model. This will not scale in the near term because a) There aren't that many types of games that get cloned over and over again with small variations that they can train their data on. Mario games, card games, toy 2d strategy games, etc. Even something as basic as the rougelike genre has so much variation between games in style, feel, gameplay loop, system design, online play, etc that I don't think you can mix them up in an algorithmic slurry and get anything legible out on the other end. b) The output of this so far looks ... really bad to be frank. It's unacceptably low res, no anti aliasing, you immediately see that this is just a sprite superimposed over the provided images. It looks so terrible that they are not getting buzz from word of mouth (the tweet thread has very much not gone viral despite being up for 3 days now). c) Getting a character to move left or right and jump in a 2d scene with some collision detection is the only thing this has done and that is the easiest part of making a game. I have seen average 13 year olds manage it. There is so much technical depth in games and game engines beyond getting a sprite to render and move. They don't even have a walk animation in this demo. Good luck ever getting this to create a double buffer for rendering. The game industry very jealously keeps its code internal and its gonna take more than the payouts reddit and tumblr have been getting for ATVI/EA/Ubisoft to give up their source to Google. If Google had kept Stadia around, that actually could have provided them with so much free training data from the images being passed back and forth, but since Google is a non-functional company we don't have to worry about that :) d) Bugginess in a game, once over a certain threshold, causes players to drop the game really quickly. I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of bugs or what the process would be to fix them in this mess. You could create the same thing back in the day with a webpage where users can submit a set of background tiles and then run a flash mario game superimposed over those images.