- Funny. I had claude recreate Thrust based on wiki article alone - and it nailed it. I then spent a week trying to implement a perfect autopilot for it. And then a solveable level generator. I have this running as a screen saver in one of my apps.
by airbreather
0 subcomment
- 8 months ago I got claude to do a perfect reproduction of the arcade asteroids game on a simple prompt and a once through.
I then got it to do lunar lander, that was also perfect, and very hard to land.
by iainmerrick
1 subcomments
- Your reconstruction is so close, I'm a little surprised you didn't stick with the original controls! Even though the BBC had a rather weird layout for all the non-alphanumeric keys.
It's been a very long time since I played Thrust, and I've played plenty of WASD games in the meantime, but it still felt really strange to control it that way rather than the classic BBC Z/X/*/? for left/right/up/down.
Pretty sure it was return to fire, space for shield/tractor; and maybe * for thrust? Edit to add: ah, no, shift to thrust. Works very well on modern keyboards too.
by cortesoft
2 subcomments
- I feel like a lot of the success of an AI project currently still comes down to the skills of the operator. I don't think it is possible to say "AI can't create this because I told AI to create it and it failed" any more than you can say "You can't write this in Rust because I tried and failed."
There is still a TON of skill involved in guiding an AI to create something, and how good it turns out has a lot to do with how the AI development process went.
by heaney-555
2 subcomments
- I hate when people say "AI" without specifying which model. It's like saying "plane" without specifying if you're talking about a Cessna or an F-22 Raptor.
> I asked Claude
There is no such thing as 'Claude'. Claude is a brand of model, some incredibly dumb and some incredibly capable. Was this 4.6 Sonnet? 5 Fable? Without specifying, the post is essentially meaningfless.
- Someone should update the Lunar Lander page on Wikipedia -- it doesn't mention Thrust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre...
by AndrewKemendo
0 subcomment
- I tried to use his writeup to oneshot the game and you can see my results here along with the prompts I used:
https://kemendo.com/thrust-one-shot.html
Notably while the game "works" it's not even close to an a "reproduction" as far as I can tell - moreso an interpretation.
This has one level that doesn't level increment, none of the adversarial sprites are correct and the color and iconography are incorrect.
Granted I didn't give it much to work with but I figured I'd see what happens. As far as one shots go, I've seen worse.
I used commodity GPT 5.6 HIGH on firefox via chat interface
- > Now to be fair I was working from some commented disassembled source code
So claude didn't understand anything, and you would have done well to read the comments instead of the llm's output summarising the comments...
- Hmm - the article isn't dated and it doesn't mention which models were used for the initial slop version. The initial commit in the git repo is from Feb 15, 2026.
I wonder how the initial pass would fare now with Fable 5 or 5.6 Sol?
- > This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly.
Complaining about slop with slop.
- I'd be interested in seeing the "slop" version for comparison.
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