The developer who created seminal and essential Windows components like Task Manager, Zip Folders, and erm... Windows Pinball has shared a game he made in xAI's Grok 3 today. Breakout, a ball-bouncing brick-breaking arcade title initially released by Atari in 1976, was the target of Dave W Plummer's latest adventure in code. However, this time, the development was done at incredible speed using just a few choice 'prompts' and the power of Grok 3.
Spoiler alert: Plummer did indeed share the code on GitHub. You can review, download, and tinker with it yourself. He only needed to make a few prompt revisions to get Grok3-Breakout up and running in an acceptable form.
He asked Grok 3, "How about a colored version of Breakout?" Checking the results, he revised the prompt to "Make the player move automatically under computer control, and make the ball go 10% faster each time it bounces off the paddle." Plummer says the final revision was "Good, but the ball can get stuck in a vertical bounce. How did the original game handle that? Do the same! And make the player aim for remaining bricks."
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If you download the raw HTML file and try it in a Javascript-enabled browser, you will notice that the game 'plays itself.' This seems to be because Plummer followed up with a couple of re-prompts: "a) Make the player automatic, [and] b) Make the player aim at the remaining bricks." So, if you want to play this version of 'Grok3-Breakout', you should use the earlier set of prompts in Grok 3, as reproduced in the above paragraph. Those feeling more adventurous could add gaming frills like power-ups, multiple balls, and/or laser cannons.
Breakout can be a fun game, and there have been many entertaining versions over the years (a personal favorite is 1987's Bolo by Meinolf Schneider for Atari ST mono mode). However, some social media commenters asked Plummer to try other titles (like Tempest or Pinball), and others decided to show off their AI-generated games/prompts.
Earlier this week, xAI made an early preview of the Grok 3 AI model available to the masses. Yesterday, I heard from xAI owner Elon Musk about his intention to create an AI gaming studio to develop 'AI games' with photo-realistic graphics. Other simple bubble and block games were shared at the time. However, how we move from recreating arcade classics with Grok 3 to photo-real masterpieces remains something of a head-scratcher. Perhaps we will have to wait for the model leaving beta and feature update rollouts that were teased during the official launch day announcement.
