Mr. Roboto

When I was five years old, my mom and I played video games together. We were particularly enamored with one called Mr. Roboto, a puzzle game where you assembled pieces and parts into an obstacle course, then solved it. We played endlessly: building puzzles for each other, working together on the ones that came in the box.

One day I was home with my dad, my mom away, and I couldn't find the five-and-a-quarter floppy the game lived on. So I did the obvious thing. I found another floppy, got a marker and a label, wrote MR. ROBOTO on it, and stuck it on the disk. That, I figured, was all it really took to make a game.

I put it in the Atari. A game came up. There was a robot on the screen — but it was wrong. The robot was too small, and it wasn't a puzzle game at all; it was a platformer. I didn't care. I was awestruck, because right then I knew I knew how to make video games: you simply write down what you want. Maybe I'd misspelled it. Maybe my handwriting wasn't legible enough to get the exact game I'd asked for. But I had written a game into existence.

(I had also, it turns out, not stuck the label on quite right. It peeled off inside the drive and broke our Atari. Sorry, mom.)

It took me years to solve the real puzzle: the disk I found was never blank. It already held a different robot game — Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory (Datamost, 1983, by Ron Rosen), an Atari platformer where a little robot climbs platforms, ladders and conveyor belts collecting power pills. It even shipped with a level editor. My robot wasn't wrong because of my handwriting. He was somebody else's robot all along.

Then, a few decades later, it happened again. I typed a handful of sentences into a generative model, and it handed me back a game. Playable. Complete. Mine. For a moment I was five years old again, and the label worked. That feeling was so profound that sharing it became the company: we wanted everyone to feel it.

There are other futures for this technology. They are less hopeful.

So our mission is to build the good one: a world where everyone is a creator and a dreamer.

— Lloyd Hilaiel, founder · aitaco LLC