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TECH & AI
This Guy Is Trying to Vibe Code GTA 6 Before Its Official Release
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Grand Theft Auto VI is finally set to come out this November, after being in development for roughly a decade. For many fans, the wait has felt even longer considering Grand Theft Auto V first came out in 2013. Now, one AI startup founder apparently can’t wait any longer, so he’s trying to vibe code his own version. “Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out,” wrote 25-year-old Ziwen Xu on X this Wednesday. “Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this. Spent a couple hours getting the whole project structured and pushed to the repo.” The post included a short clip of the game, which on day one mostly consisted of a 3D blue oval moving and jumping around some gray blocks. Xu seems to be pretty sincere about the effort. He has been posting updates every day since the original post and has even shared the code repository on GitHub. Still, it does make you wonder how much time this project is taking away from his day job as the founder of Hyperecho, a startup that helps companies deploy “AI employees.”

“The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway,” wrote Xu. The project appears to have been inspired by a post from another AI startup founder and investor.

“Someone should set up a community-funded Fable run with a prompt like: ‘/loop until you’ve created a GTA-VI-caliber open-world game with a quality and scope surpassing what is shown in the initial trailers,’” wrote Matt Shumer in a post reposted by Xu. Basically, the idea is to see whether Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, a safer public version of the company’s more advanced Mythos model, could vibe code a GTA-caliber video game. Vibe coding is a relatively new approach where developers rely heavily on AI assistants to generate and debug code using natural language prompts.

Some high-profile tech founders are fond of the approach. Jack Dorsey vibe coded at least two apps last year. Meanwhile, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, has said that using AI agents is “net unhelpful.” Still, on day two Xu posted a video showing a much more human-looking character running around an urban landscape, though he admitted it was still far from perfect. “The agent built downtown LA skyscrapers, which is a problem, because this is supposed to be Florida,” Xu wrote. “Also I’ve burned 33% of my 20x weekly usage in one day. So that clock is ticking.” By today’s update, the game included NPCs walking around, cars driving on roads, and even weapons.

It’ll be interesting to see how far Xu and his collaborators can take the project. Their deadline is still months away, unless Rockstar delays the game yet again.



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TECH & AI
Europe May Soon Get a Non-U.S. Alternative to Unreal Engine
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For Americans, following European news can feel like trying to follow a soccer game on your neighbor’s TV while in your own living room there are two simultaneous gunfights, a nu-metal concert, and someone revving a pickup truck for no reason. But it’s worth keeping an eye on Europe right now, because in areas like tech and defense, a trend has emerged in which Europeans are just so over our BS, and are moving on—that’s the vibe anyway. Last month, for instance, the French government began a transition from Windows to Linux. And now, the Dutch co-creator of the legendary 90s game Jazz Jackrabbit has a vision of a Europe unshackled by the Unreal Engine, a load-bearing pillar of the gaming world also used in other media, and he may just have the chops and experience to pull it off. Caution is probably merited, though, because he sounds well and truly AI-pilled.

As noticed by Video Games Chronicle, Arjan Brussee, the co-founder of Horizon: Zero Dawn studio Guerrilla Games appeared on the Dutch tech podcast De Technoloog earlier this week to talk about his project, “the Immense Engine,” an alternative piece of general purpose software that would theoretically provide a true alternative to Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is the software foundation of Fortnite most famously, but also of classics like Gears of War, Bioshock Infinite, Mass Effect, and Batman Arkham City. It’s also used in Hollywood productions like the Mandalorian and is even used to make popular Kids’ YouTube content. European game engines exist, notably Germany-based CryEngine, which is associated with the Far Cry games, but that’s mostly a first-person shooter engine, and has long struggled with adoption.

If anyone has the credibility to build Unreal-Engine-but-for-people-who-eat-muesli, it’s probably Brussee. He’s both a successful gaming entrepreneur in his own right, and has worked across multiple decades at Unreal Engine parent company Epic Games.

Some translated statements about his plans for the Immense Engine come from Video Games Chronicle (a U.K-based blog, so it’s not clear who or what actually translated them). Brussee apparently said, “No one is currently making an engine that is fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines.” He also hinted at a goal of Unreal-like generalizability, saying, “Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming.” But he apparently also claimed, “The rise of AI means that we need to approach the development of this kind of crucial software differently,” and “if you are smart and know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people.” So the codebase for this project sounds like it will be heavily, um, AI-assisted. Maybe Brussee will use Mistral’s models, just to keep things European.



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