Microsoft has released a demo of an AI-generated version of Quake you can play in the browser (well, desktop browsers, iPads aren’t good enough, apparently). And I don’t mean a version of the game vibe-coded, I mean one that takes your inputs and generates every updated frame using an LLM. They’re excited about this as a way of showing how they can brings games to more places, but as it did earlier this year, this truly makes me want to crawl up a wall.

Quake came out in 1996 and is so light by todays standards that any computer you own today can run it while using about 1% of its power. Here’s a link to play it in the browser at a higher resolution and higher frame rate (even on mobile browsers!) than Microsoft’s version. Microsoft is actually finding the most inefficient way to play this game and packaging it as some great innovation.

As I said last time, the blocker that makes playing old games hard today has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with companies withholding them from players.