Vidjama Gmaes Work

I spend some time with Copilot’s Quake 2 demo.

I spent some time today with the Microsoft Copilot Quake 2 demo and by some time I mean I laughed. A lot. Mostly at the idea of venture capitalists and the tens of billions of dollars the tech industry is burning at an amazing rate on technology that fifteen years ago would have been pitched into the trash way earlier in development. The more I see generative AI the more convinced I am that the people behind it weren’t bullied nearly enough back in high school.

The Quake 2 demo is a piece of work that anyone behind it should be utterly embarrassed by, but given that severe personality disorders seem to be a benchmark of working in that industry that’s not in the cards any time soon. You can play a demo of Quake 2 generated entirely by Microsoft’s awful Copilot program and by play I mean watch the software fumble through poorly recreating something at a fraction of the functionality with exponentially more time and effort, and electrical power wasted in the meantime.

You see because Copilot’s AI demo isn’t really a game. What it is at its heart is a series of screenshots that the program tries to pretend is a full game. It knows some constants, like you have a gun and it fires. It has no object permanence for things off screen, as simply looking at the ground will cause the room around you to shift. Look into the sky long enough and the game completely forgets to make a map.

Have an enemy run past you and in all likelihood the game will forget he exists by the time you turn around. Kill an enemy and their body will melt into the floor and become part of the scenery because it doesn’t know how to handle rendering corpses. Shit real game developers figured out over forty years ago. And the fact that they’re using Quake 2 as the benchmark here could only be funnier if they used Doom.

Quake 2 is a game that, by today’s standards, I could run on a toaster. I could probably get Quake 2 running at a decent framerate by hooking it into a higher-quality rectal thermometer. It requires a whole 16mb of ram and 45mb of uncompressed hard drive space. Copilot meanwhile requires massive levels of hardware and resources and isn’t even up to the level of playing the game with sound.

There are c-suite executives in tech furiously masturbating over the idea that this will one day put programmers and artists out of work so they can keep all the money to themselves and generate games with a single prompt, but I just don’t see it. There’s no way in hell this tech ever makes a profit, although a big part of the goal is to make the competition nonexistent.

I can’t wait for the backers behind this horrible phase in tech to be bankrupt or dead so we can stop hearing about it.