Simon Willison: October 2026 is the vibe-coding-games inflection point, Opus 5.5 knows fun
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-10-28
Simon Willison argues October 2026 marks an inflection point for vibe coding games: models now produce games that are genuinely fun, not just game-shaped. Key evidence from four browser games he built with Claude Opus 5.5:
- Tree Appreciator: delightful one-shot spot-the-difference game with algorithmic three.js trees, zero iteration
- Emberwick: top-down fantasy RPG iterated from engine demo to a 15-minute story with plot twists; emotionally affected him at the ending. Same prompts on GPT-6 Pro looked great but played worse
- Battle Drones: Command & Conquer-style RTS, transformed by "Make it a LOT more fun" + a three.js port; now has 2-4 player multiplayer, replays, 7 maps, random map generator, mutators, and LLM-vs-LLM matches; Apache 2.0, already forked into steampunk "Panache"
- Quarter Sun Cove: inspired by the Half Moon Bay pumpkin festival
Takeaway: making games fun is shockingly easy now; the new challenge is inventing game concepts that wouldn't exist without AI. GPT-6 Astra can build games but its sense of fun lags Opus 5.5.
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