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Show HN: Super Dario

superdario.pawb.de

397 pointsthepasch100 comments

This game was so good, it's as if the developer was given a team of PhD-level experts to work on it.

Haters will suggest AI built this, but I can personally tell there’s at least a kilomolyneux (approx. 55 centikojimas) of PhD-level game dev expertise involved.

Funny idea but wow the gameplay is terrible and full of bugs. Bad hitboxes, shells that bounce in front of holes, bad physics.

AI still cannot oneshot 2D platformers, the most documented videogame genre with so much source code available.

Not to mention it feels like 30hz on my 120hz monitor. It's actually impressive how it managed to mess that up.

But yeah guys, AI sure will be writing all the code just give it another 6 months...

It feels like each new SOTA model brings the average quality a bit closer to the asymptote of well-made non-vibecoded software but it can't quite cross it.

Just amazing how right a few people at Nintendo got this in 1985, and its still so easy to get it absolutely wrong.

Nintendo wasn’t even trying, it was all their old sprite characters from Japan market that didn’t do well smashed together in a rushed title for an NA launch. It surprised them.

Huh? This is very much not my understanding of SMB1’s development. Are you maybe thinking of Donkey Kong (made to replace a failed arcade game) and/or the US version of SMB2 (a re-skinned non-Mario Japanese game)?

Nope, SMB1 was a smash up. SMB2 was made by folks that had no idea what they were doing so SMB3 went back to basics. I very much remember the sequence of events. Mario Bro's (and Donkey Kong) were games on the Famicom in Japan that were decent. The issue was with Arcade's in Japan making more money than home systems so they introduced the Nintendo VS cabinets. This helped but it wasn't enough and so in 1985 they greenlit the Super Mario Bros proposal while dealing with the NA launch and the NYC event. Shigeru Miyamoto carried the development and he deserves the credit but corporate was throwing shit at the fan and seeing what sticked. He just so happened to have a plan that required less work from creative.

Any links to read more about this?

Most of it has been lost to internet history but there are still some remnants left.

https://grantland.com/features/the-rise-of-nintendo-video-ga...

https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/0/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w1zl4/when_...

Thanks!

Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken many times about the process of perfecting the controls for SMB, which is quite the opposite of "wasn't even trying".

Oh he absolutely cared about the programming and process of game development, don't get me wrong. It's that Nintendo (corporate) needed something for the NA market and he was eager to fill that gap with already used characters (such as Mario). Anything else is corporate propaganda they have been telling as a creation myth to make it sound more fairytale-like than it was. They were going broke. They needed money. North America was ripe for the picking. The risk paid off.

On the "bright side", it's impossible to die!

That's the power of venture capital!

This was my favorite bit of meta-commentary: it doesn't matter how poorly you play, you never lose!

Even survived the Hegseth Bullet Bill attack

More like keeps "extending by 1 more week"

you mean amodei

It seems that you do lose a life when hit by an enemy or falling in a pit, but the latter freezes until you click the toggle sound button, and running out of lives resets the counter to 3 and halves your "valuation".

You’re absolutely right! /s

Yep. Additionally having experimented pretty heavily in this space, I'll state that even with state-of-the-art models (like NB Pro or GPT-Image-2), good luck getting them to generate sprite sheets with consistent frames for animation particularly if you're shooting for a pixel art aesthetic.

I've made a few sprite-based animations with AI assistance but it still required a fair amount of manual photoshop (or in my case Aseprite) post-processing.

If you're not going for pixel art, use the video to video models (the character swap ones that take in a video reference of the animation and a still of the character (the tiktok deepfake models)).

You can e.g. download a run cycle from Mixamo, use Blender to render a video from whatever angle you wish, and feed that into the model along with your sprite on a green background, it's pretty much perfect.

Thanks for the info! I'll give this a shot. Most of my knowledge is from over a year ago, when I would set up OpenPose-style positioning with a controlnet at a high strength to guide an image-to-image workflow in comfyui. But it was pretty tedious and prone to errors.

It’s a tough problem but Retro Diffusion is making some incredible progress

https://retrodiffusion.ai/

Nice. I need to go check them out again. I really liked their original Retro Diffusion models but this a while back in the SDXL days. It felt like it was trained on more natural language, so prompting it was quite nice for that era.

But if they’ve been working on it specifically for animation, that’s pretty neat.

They have a few different specialized models now and have put a lot of work into generating sprite sheet animations. The latest thing is a pipeline for ensuring pixel perfect results that also look good stylistically.

One-shotting is a bit of a red herring, imo. Let's say I wanted to build a "Super Dario" meme platformer. I would do some research, find a platformer on Codepen or Github that "feels" good, tweak it to my liking, change the sprites, and voila.

I constantly have to tell agents to just "look it up online" and "don't hallucinate your own components" because people have already done this a million times. Ironically, being more lazy could make these models more useful.

So you're saying that it's not fair to rate a coding model on its ability to code, and instead the best way to use it is to tell it to find existing human-written code online rather than generate actual code on its own?

Isn't part of the human coding that Super Dario tells us LLM are going to replace also made of what you are saying GP is saying?

If you're testing how good LLMs are at compressing information, then I think that's a fair test. Personally, I don't really think that's where their strength comes from (especially considering how much more useful local models that are orders of magnitude smaller than Claude/OpenAI-tier models have gotten). In other words, we already have a "super-intelligence"—it's called the internet, so just use the darn thing.

Yes for any slightly non-standard web UI components I either tell the LLM to search the web and find examples or I provide them myself.

Usually the ones I provide myself are better than the ones they find themselves.

I'm not super clear how they search the web or what they do and don't have access to. It seems to be quite fast.

TBH, I wonder how much one-shotting posts are just lying about one-shotting it.

Many for sure.

Strange, I use M3 and Sonnet a lot, they never hallucinated. Gemini used to make up some function names, but it was in long context windows. My AGENTS.md does specific they should use context7 when unsure about a library, but still…

I think that supports the premise more than it defies it

Strong agree. Very much part of the joke.

I don’t know if it’s showcasing that AI is still that bad, or if it’s purposely built to be this bad in a funny type of way.

Absolute fire. Love how Deepseek tortoise shell can only be slowed, not killed.

Thank you, I missed that.

You can bounce on them forever for infinite coins. But the coins don't matter. Nothing matters.

Okay, so, maker here!

I was expecting this to drown in the flood of /newest, so seeing so many folks get a chuckle out of this is a very pleasant surprise. The obvious spark for this was yesterday's second last-minute extension of the Fable promotional window (a phrase comprised of two heavily strained words at this point), and an hour or so of back-and-forth with GLM-5.2 and Opus later, here we are.

The game is, of course, unwinnable on purpose. There is no ending. The flag always escapes, the date always extends, and new GPT releases will continue to wipe your valuation no matter how many coins or funding round power-ups you collect. The win condition is closing the tab because you're tired of it, which I'd argue makes it the most realistic AI-industry simulation currently available on the internet.

The code is, of course, vibe-slopped, most of the imagery is original human-slop (or sourced from icon libraries). Happy to answer any and all questions and take any and all flak. The bugs are a part of the joke, I swear!

This is great lol

Can you release a version playable on mobile?

Yeah, on it right now! Should be up within the hour.

edit: It's up!

Level 10 government subsidy invincible mode

gotta save some ideas for the sequel

well done, got a good laugh out of this one.

I'd be interested in seeing your prompts, out of curiosity.

Either way I had a good laugh when I realized it wasn't going to end and getting the coins/tokens was pointless.

I think you should try submitting it to anthropic community :)

https://claude.com/community#:~:text=What,Claude%3F

I'll... uh, do it next week!

Wow, my entire feelings on this series of events summed up in a single game. Extra rich its vibe coded. We need more of this.

Someone didn't know how to use the remaining credits.

The heavy lifting was done by Opus. I wouldn't burn precious soon-to-be-departing Fable usage on this!

I wouldnt be so sure Fable wouldnt just refuse to do this

I mean, technically, "I selected Fable for this task" and "Opus did the heavy lifting" aren't mutually exclusive statements...?

I see your super dario and raise you doctor dario:

https://doctordario.ai

If you like tech-themed games, I made Good Til Canceled for GTC - check it out - https://goodtilcanceled.com/

Desktop Safari 18.6 / Mac: Nice, but none of the text on the signs are readable. Just appears as unreadable dots. Also the music doesn't work on Safari.

Firefox works great!

Agh, sorry about that. I had no Mac around to test this on, though I might be able to get one by proxy. I'll try to get it fixed.

Same bug in iOS 27 chrome.

The game is really cool, but I'm a bit dissapoint by the music. I want the original them song. Also the fact that the game is never ending bothers my OCD

+1 for the claude icon fire bars

Omg, so funny! I can’t believe I played this for like 5 min straight

Are those little Sam Altmans?!

Love the power ups: tokenmaxxing, usage reset

After playing this game, I think it's time to launch 'vibe game design.' Now that the code is solved, it's time to release 'vibe game design,' 'vibe music design,' and 'vibe control design' for serious game design

This reminded me of how much I suck at side-scroller arcade games. I keep missing those coins and falling off ledges... :-(

Good thing I have a day job. Where I don't use AI.

For all of the advertising of GPT 5.6 in this charming little game, the chatgpt.com UI has failed to load in the past several hours for me

Why do the coins spin faster when I move?

Momentum. And / or Special Relativity.

Can’t believe this doesn’t already exist.

Out of all AI slops, this is best one and depicts what Dario's AI (Claude) is capable of.

The game must be banned for 6 months

  New Gemini model! Nobody cares.

With the Gemini power-up falling off the screen got a chuckle out of me

This was my favorite as well.

The music reminds me of Mappy Land (one of my favorite childhood games).

No credit to me for that! Got it off of here: https://opengameart.org/content/bonus-round-8bit

Shouldn't the valuation be in Bs instead of Ms?

Numbers look bigger when multiplied by one thousand

Grab that coin and you'll get there!

a perfect representation of the situation

This wins the internet this week!

I wonder which model built it :-)

this guy fits better, I guess: https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/videos/04iSw6696vB87oa...

Absolutely hilarious

Open source it? :-)

No mobile support.

Thanks for your contribution.

On-screen controls are live!

Now all that's missing is being able to move and jump at once

I mean, Sam should be more of a ghoul with those creepy sunken eyes. And Dario that guy with hair on the sides.

Nice and clever!

incredible

Like political satire, only in IT.

hahaahhahahahahahahahahahah

There are plenty of critiques of the AI labs but it's a bit ironic leveling criticism in a game which was obviously one-shotted by their models and which would never have been made without AI

A model harness can launch a bagillion sub agents and we still call it one shotting.

... And why shouldn't we? The system still responded to a single prompt, and we still took its first submitted candidate.

That's part of the joke.

who needs this AI-genrated game for real though? Would not I rather play the real Mario instead? this is clearly part of the joke!

Fighting them with their own weapons isn’t ironic it’s poetic justice

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