Why this game?
I grew up with the Commodore 64 and BC's Quest For Tires was one of the first games I got. Countless hours I controlled this caveman called Thor, driving his stone wheel to save his girl from a bloodthirsty dinosaur.
As a webdeveloper, AI is part of my daily activities and I wondered how easy it would be to recreate a (very) basic version of this classic. Apart from the graphics, I haven't written any code, everything was done using prompts only.
I started off with ChatGPT and feeding it the Wikipedia page as well as a description of the game. After a couple of hours I had the basics working, however the collision detection had a small bug which seemed impossible to fix using ChatGPT. It was hallucinating and going round in circles, so I decided to try my luck by submitting what I had so far to Gemini.
Gemini fixed the issue at the first prompt (and also felt much faster, somehow ChatGPT had issues with the now large context of all the code, causing a 2-3 second delay while typing). I also used Gemini to fix the mobile controls and make the game responsive.
All in all, a fun experiment that shows how far AI has come for the end user!
Trivia:
- The actual game sold over a million copies!
- My high score is 98 on the day of release (16/02/2026)