Ethan Mollick one-shots 8 distinct Edgar Allan Poe games with Fable 5.1, open-sourced on GitHub
emollick · x · 2026-09-07
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick shared a one-shot experiment: he asked Fable 5.1 to "build out at least 8 games based on Edgar Allan Poe, all great and very distinctive." The model took the distinctiveness seriously — the games vary widely in mechanics and mood, and some are genuinely creepy. The project is open-sourced as poe-arcade on GitHub.
Each game uses a different tech approach:
- The Raven: self-drawing inline SVG engraving, DOM cards, Web Audio synthesis, zero libraries
- The Tell-Tale Heart: Web Audio as the engine, visuals driven by an AnalyserNode on Canvas 2D
- The Black Cat: Rust compiled to WASM running a plaster/damp/crack simulation
- The Masque of the Red Death: three.js first-person WebGL with UnrealBloomPass
- The Pit and the Pendulum: Matter.js rigid bodies on a 2D canvas
- The Cask of Amontillado: pure CSS 3D
The repo is plain static files — no build step, no CDN, all libraries and fonts vendored. Clone and it runs.
Related event: Ethan Mollick Generates 9 Poe-Themed Games With One Prompt(3 posts)→
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