Show HN: Super Dario

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• 9 days ago

A model harness can launch a bagillion sub agents and we still call it one shotting.

zahlman2• 9 days ago

... And why shouldn't we? The system still responded to a single prompt, and we still took its first submitted candidate.

ipsum2• 9 days ago

That's part of the joke.

gordon_freeman• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

Fighting them with their own weapons isn’t ironic it’s poetic justice

pixelpanic• 9 days ago

this guy fits better, I guess: https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/videos/04iSw6696vB87oa...

einpoklum• 9 days ago

This reminded me of how much I suck at side-scroller arcade games. I keep missing those coins and falling off ledges... :-(

Good thing I have a day job. Where I don't use AI.

jake_and_fatman• 9 days ago

Absolute fire. Love how Deepseek tortoise shell can only be slowed, not killed.

boutell2• 9 days ago

Thank you, I missed that.

Pxtl• 9 days ago

You can bounce on them forever for infinite coins. But the coins don't matter. Nothing matters.

seydor• 9 days ago

The game must be banned for 6 months

andrew_ocs2• 9 days ago

I think you should try submitting it to anthropic community :)

https://claude.com/community#:~:text=What,Claude%3F

thepasch10• 9 days ago

I'll... uh, do it next week!

helloplanets• 9 days ago

Shouldn't the valuation be in Bs instead of Ms?

jagged-chisel• 9 days ago

Numbers look bigger when multiplied by one thousand

thepasch10• 9 days ago

Grab that coin and you'll get there!

dude250711• 9 days ago

Like political satire, only in IT.

goldenarm• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

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.

nsxwolf2• 9 days ago

Just amazing how right a few people at Nintendo got this in 1985, and its still so easy to get it absolutely wrong.

reactordev5• 9 days ago

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.

input_sh• 9 days ago

On the "bright side", it's impossible to die!

disillusioned• 9 days ago

That's the power of venture capital!

miyoji• 9 days ago

This was my favorite bit of meta-commentary: it doesn't matter how poorly you play, you never lose!

thisisit• 9 days ago

More like keeps "extending by 1 more week"

mkagenius• 9 days ago

you mean amodei

zahlman2• 9 days ago

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".

reactordev5• 9 days ago

You’re absolutely right! /s

vunderba3• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

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.

throwthrowuknow2• 9 days ago

It’s a tough problem but Retro Diffusion is making some incredible progress

https://retrodiffusion.ai/

dvt2• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

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?

sefrost• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

TBH, I wonder how much one-shotting posts are just lying about one-shotting it.

port11• 7 days ago

Strange, I use M3 and Sonnet a lot, they never hallucinated. Gemini used to make up some function names, but it was in long context windows. My AGENTS.md does specific they should use context7 when unsure about a library, but still…

micromacrofoot• 9 days ago

I think that supports the premise more than it defies it

boutell2• 9 days ago

Strong agree. Very much part of the joke.

uncivilized4• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

This game was so good, it's as if the developer was given a team of PhD-level experts to work on it.

Waterluvian• 9 days ago

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.

thepasch10• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

This is great lol

Can you release a version playable on mobile?

thepasch10• 9 days ago

Yeah, on it right now! Should be up within the hour.

edit: It's up!

kylehotchkiss• 9 days ago

Level 10 government subsidy invincible mode

thepasch10• 9 days ago

gotta save some ideas for the sequel

frankdenbow• 9 days ago

well done, got a good laugh out of this one.

solaire_oa• 9 days ago

I'd be interested in seeing your prompts, out of curiosity.

Either way I had a good laugh when I realized it wasn't going to end and getting the coins/tokens was pointless.

Cider9986• 9 days ago

No mobile support.

parl_match• 9 days ago

Thanks for your contribution.

thepasch10• 9 days ago

On-screen controls are live!

m132• 9 days ago

Now all that's missing is being able to move and jump at once

sherlock-holmes• 9 days ago

incredible

salahadawi• 9 days ago

  New Gemini model! Nobody cares.

With the Gemini power-up falling off the screen got a chuckle out of me

mchusma• 9 days ago

This was my favorite as well.

kaeruct• 9 days ago

Why do the coins spin faster when I move?

kridsdale13• 9 days ago

Momentum. And / or Special Relativity.

sajithdilshan• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

I mean, Sam should be more of a ghoul with those creepy sunken eyes. And Dario that guy with hair on the sides.

meken• 9 days ago

The music reminds me of Mappy Land (one of my favorite childhood games).

thepasch10• 9 days ago

No credit to me for that! Got it off of here: https://opengameart.org/content/bonus-round-8bit

_s_a_m_• 9 days ago

hahaahhahahahahahahahahahah

slicendice• 9 days ago

Absolutely hilarious

CrzyLngPwd• 9 days ago

I wonder which model built it :-)

neural_thing• 9 days ago

If you like tech-themed games, I made Good Til Canceled for GTC - check it out - https://goodtilcanceled.com/

ryandrake• 9 days ago

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!

thepasch10• 9 days ago

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.

kridsdale13• 9 days ago

Same bug in iOS 27 chrome.

aliasxneo• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

This wins the internet this week!

jdw64• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

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• 9 days ago

Open source it? :-)

nico• 9 days ago

Omg, so funny! I can’t believe I played this for like 5 min straight

Are those little Sam Altmans?!

Love the power ups: tokenmaxxing, usage reset

ashish004• 9 days ago

Out of all AI slops, this is best one and depicts what Dario's AI (Claude) is capable of.

Show HN: Super Dario

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