Investor touts "AI games are going to be amazing" — posts a hallucination of a shooter and the internet roasts it

On Thursday night Matt Shumer, CEO of writing‑AI company HyperWrite, tossed a bold prediction onto X: "AI games are going to be amazing (sound on)." He attached an AI‑generated video meant to serve as a proof‑of‑concept. The clip instead became proof that right now "AI games" can mean "a moving collage of gaming nonsense." What arrived was less playable demo and more surreal highlight reel of generation gone wrong. The footage jumps between first‑ and third‑person views with no concern for continuity: a soldier rappels from a helicopter onto a Manhattan street and showers glass as if breaching a window, then brandishes an MP5 that suddenly sports multiple sets of sights and fires rounds that explode in a shower of sparks inches from the barrel. Street signs flicker between "DELI," "DELE," and "DEE." A subway entrance labeled "Sublone" appears with stairs that go up, while onscreen choices like "dive into the Uptown subway" and "climb the fire escape" appear and are ignored or misinterpreted by the clip’s internal logic. Scenes splice into each other by whim: a train extrudes from a wall, a man melts an incendiary object into existence and then fires a bolt of fire from his hand, a shotgun blast somehow becomes the approved way to "take cover behind the HVAC," and a radial menu offers options such as "Condemt" and "Guwht dade." At one point the player’s shot damages the player instead of the target. The video finishes with a manhole ladder popping into being and a radio voice announcing the game‑standard, comforting threat: "they've got a chopper on us." Reaction was swift and merciless. Clips and screencaps spread around the web with captions ranging from bemused to outright hostile; one user summed up the general feeling with, "Dude this fucking sucks." Critics argued the piece exposed the present limits of purely automated content generation: fractured animation, inconsistent object permanence, and storytelling that collapses under its own ambition. Shumer pushed back, telling followers the clip was never intended as a finished product. "They're not finished products… they're glimpses of what's coming," he replied, adding that while the demo isn't an AAA game today, "AI‑powered games will be incredible in 5 years." Whether one views the clip as a blip in a steady march of tooling improvements or as emblematic of hype outpacing capability depends on your patience for iteration. HyperWrite, whose product descriptions include generators for things like "Team Member Praise" and mass‑market sympathy cards, is hardly the only company betting that generative models will radically speed up content creation for games. Proponents point to faster level prototyping, on‑the‑fly NPC behavior, and cheaper asset generation; skeptics point to a laundry list of present problems — inconsistent animation, broken physics, and the uncanny valley of AI writing and visuals that look plausible only until you try to play them. The clip’s strange charm lies in that tension: it’s at once a showpiece for rapid generative possibility and a reminder of the long engineering and design work that turns concepts into satisfying games. Shumer’s video may be a hint at tools to come, but for now it functions best as a cautionary meme — an AI‑made videogame that proves one thing loudly and clearly: we are a long way from trading in human designers for a single prompt. If AI does deliver an "amazing" future for games, the route there will almost certainly be iterative and collaborative, not instantaneous. The internet’s response to Thursday’s demo suggests players will demand more than flashes of potential: they’ll want coherence, consistent rules, and the kinds of polish that make games feel lived‑in rather than generated on a dare.