MarioGPT Uses AI to Generate Endless Super Mario Levels for Free
The secret to Mario games is a new gimmick introduced every level. They&#x27;ve gotten better at this over the years, and Mario 1 + Lost Levels is the worst example of it. That makes it a great comp for GPT-3 which can churn out an endless supply of flavorless brick &amp; pipe levels and still feel vaguely Mario 1. Were this tool to live up to the hype of &quot;indies punching above their weight&quot;, it would need to design novel platformer mechanics. The work it&#x27;s doing isn&#x27;t the hard part of platformer level design.<p>For another example of why this isn&#x27;t commercially viable, look at what happened with Super Mario Maker. In that game _humans_ are given a fixed set of Mario doodads with which to build levels. But Nintendo kept the secret sauce for themselves - the ability to create new doodads. What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. Even if you trained MarioGPT on the rich set of level data available in Mario Maker, you would not have an algorithm that makes commercially viable Mario levels.