AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)

Funny. I had claude recreate Thrust based on wiki article alone - and it nailed it. I then spent a week trying to implement a perfect autopilot for it. And then a solveable level generator. I have this running as a screen saver in one of my apps.

I tried to use his writeup to oneshot the game and you can see my results here along with the prompts I used:

https://kemendo.com/thrust-one-shot.html

Notably while the game "works" it's not even close to an a "reproduction" as far as I can tell - moreso an interpretation.

This has one level that doesn't level increment, none of the adversarial sprites are correct and the color and iconography are incorrect.

Granted I didn't give it much to work with but I figured I'd see what happens. As far as one shots go, I've seen worse.

I used commodity GPT 5.6 HIGH on firefox via chat interface

> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly.

Complaining about slop with slop.

Hmm - the article isn't dated and it doesn't mention which models were used for the initial slop version. The initial commit in the git repo is from Feb 15, 2026.

I wonder how the initial pass would fare now with Fable 5 or 5.6 Sol?

I'd be interested in seeing the "slop" version for comparison.