Over the last eight days (as of writing this), more than 40,000 people, from over 150 countries, played a video game I made.

Well, saying I made the game might be a bit of a stretch. I didn’t write a single line of code. When the game was being cooked up, I wasn’t even on my computer half the time. A solid chunk of the game’s codebase was written while I was out at Five Guys eating a burger (Five Guys doesn’t sponsor Pirate Wires… but they should).

Over the span of a couple of days, the game was engineered entirely by AI (specifically, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5, though after the game was released I tweaked a few things with Astra). Sure, I gave it the creative direction, suggested features to add, and play-tested the game to find some bugs (the fun stuff). But LLMs did most of the work.

AI games are not new. Many, many people have shared impressive personal projects, including various 3D games, all made by AI. And because AI has enabled everyone to build their own ideas, I assumed the demo I tweeted from my little account last week would be lost in the algorithm.

But I was surprised to find, when I woke up, that my X post of a demo clip I recorded of the game (sans audio) had amassed thousands of likes. As I write this, the short video sits at two million impressions. It went so viral that Boris Cherny, the man at Anthropic who created Claude Code — which I used to make the bulk of the game — responded, calling it “like superhot [an indie first-person shooter] as a doodle.”

Clearly, I was the beneficiary of good algorithmic fortune. But I do actually think there is something a bit different about my game that helped it go viral.