The Lionhead legacy goes even deeper, as I remember the lead up and hype for their first game Black and White. You'd have a creature that you didn't control but rather you "taught it" what you wanted it to do. I can't remember if the words neural net were mentioned in some of pieces I read in PC Gamer, but I feel like it might have been. It was going to be a revolution in game AI because it wasn't just a bunch of if-statements or state machines. And who was the hotshot young programmer behind this wizardry? A young Cambridge graduate named Demis Hassabis, who'd previous done level design and other work for Bullfrog as a teenage before attending university!

Of course on the meagre PCs of the day this revolutionary AI didn't quite pan out and you couldn't ever really get your creature to do what you want. And what became of our young AI programmer? Well after a few more years in the game industry he went back to school and continued his pursuit of AI and neural nets and founded a little company that you might have heard of, Deep Mind, aka Google's AI division creating things like AlphaGo and generally kicking off the machine learning revolution we currently find ourselves in.

And to think, you could have had a preview of all of this, like I did, back in 2001 on a janky underpowered PC, cursing at my neural net powered ape creature as I tried to get it to stop crushing my village.

There are tons. I loved Starglider 2, produced by Argonaut Games. It's like No Man's Sky, but is from the 80s.