A software engineer who goes by Desimulate on X recently posted a five-second clip of AI-generated pixel art that went viral. Think your favorite Instagram pixel artist recreating Daggerfall with wild parallax scrolling effects. It was such a hit on Elon Musk’s Grok-infested social media platform that Desimulate decided to try and actually make the game the five-second clip would be from. But he’s not using AI to do it. Why? “Well, right now, the tools aren’t really good enough.”
That’s what he told Ryan K. Rigney in the latest edition of the Push to Talk newsletter. Desimulate said the viral post was the result of working very closely with Midjourney, using lots of specific reference art to try and hone the outputs while also trying to spur them into generating something new. “I just got obsessed with making something unique, and that post was the epitome of that for me. And it kind of came out of nowhere,” he told Rigney.
omw pic.twitter.com/eCiTOrjtzC
— Desimulate (@de5imulate) July 20, 2025
But while AI can generate a five-second clip, it’s nowhere near being able to generate an actual game based on it, let alone one as ambitious as an open-world fantasy RPG with extremely detailed pixel art. “The meshes are probably good enough to make a basic game,” he explains. “Something small. But this is a game that is kind of demanding, right? It’s going to be a real fantasy RPG. So at the end of the day, it’s going to have to be performant. The 3D generation stuff right now…the meshes are just not up to snuff. They are way too many triangles, polygons, and a lot of them kind of get messed up. And so it actually ends up taking more time to clean them than it would to just, like, start from the beginning. So we just use it as a visual reference.”
Desimulate is not a game developer. Neither am I. So I can’t tell you whether he’s making any sense. But I can tell you that he’s now trying to hire people who are game developers to turn his viral AI GIF into a game. I’ve encountered many a video game Kickstarter with vertical slices from people who have actually shipped games before that never came close to panning out. If I was a Polymarket guy, which I am definitely not, this is not the horse I’d be picking.
But I do think the interview provides a fascinating and useful look into the allure of AI tools like Midjourney and what people think they’re doing when they work with them. It’s clear Desimulate feels like he has ownership over what the machine spit out, even though his contribution to it is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things like training data. Rigney asked why he’s the one to make the game imagined by the people upvoting his post. Here’s what he said:
“I’ve got the vision, and everything starts with that vision. I’ve got the passion to make it happen. In two weeks, I’ve interviewed 40-plus people, brought a real team together of real game devs, started building, designing the game, and we’ve made a ton of progress. Obviously everything is in an R&D state. But I am committed to making it happen.”
