I’ve always admired the brilliance of the original Super Mario Bros. video game and the creativity of some of the games mimicking or even parodying its core concept. So when I started messing around with the upgraded version of Claude’s Artifacts feature, I was drawn to Anthropic’s suggestion that you have the AI assistant make a video game for you, just by asking (with a prompt, of course). This kind of “vibe coding” has become increasingly popular, but making a game, or even just a working outline of a game that you could play, goes well beyond the code snippets the Artifacts feature handled before.
Now, it promises a full-blown interactive space where you can build and share apps and games. You give it ideas. Claude gives you something you can actually use, or so it claims. As a test, I asked it to create a version of Super Mario Bros. tailored to my career as a journalist, rather than a plumber. I suggested some ideas for what the many characters and power-ups could be to match the idea of Mario as a reporter, like a pen to grow bigger instead of a mushroom, a microphone for the fire flower that lets you shoot flaming question marks, and so on.
I submitted the prompt, and 30 seconds later, Claude presented a game called Press Quest in the side window, with an option to publish and share the game with the world. This was far from the kind of game you’d see on the Nintendo Switch. It wasn’t even really at the graphic quality of the original NES version of Mario. And there were a lot of problems with how the enemies moved, not to mention I’d forgotten to describe how to get to the next level. The character was stranded on the first level even after all the enemies were eliminated and all the power-ups collected. Still, I hadn’t written a single line of code and waited half a minute. For that, it may as well have been magic.
Debugging AI
That didn’t make it a real game, of course. But enhancing and debugging with Claude using Artifacts turned out to be like making it to begin with. I asked Claude to make a newspaper building as an exit, adjust the way the enemies moved, and rework the power-ups and their locations. I even asked to make the graphics more advanced. A minute after submitting the request, it was done, and it looked and played much better.
Unfortunately, every level had the same layout. So I asked Claude to add more levels, and a couple of minutes after that, every level was different. Not always good, often quite nonsensical, and there was random HTML text outside the game window that I couldn’t convince Claude to remove. Still, it seemed like with enough time (and enough credits purchased for Claude), I could shape the game into something actually playable and maybe even fun, without once reaching for a guide to HTML. And if I did want to mess with the code or ask a friend who knows how to do so, I could simply download it and rewrite it to my heart’s content.
Artifact creation
The entire process, from concept through development and editing, took less than an hour. I didn’t install anything. I didn’t touch any code. I didn’t even leave the chat window. It was still a pixelated 2D side-scroller about a journalist. But it had personality and flair and was starting to look how I imagined it in my head.
I might have been a little ambitious since the new Artifacts features are still in beta. My colleagues made some very clean and fun versions of Space Invaders and Asteroids. I encourage you to check them out if you want to recreate the feel of an arcade in 1983.
You can make any game or app with Claude’s Artifacts if you have an idea for one. Just open Claude on a browser or using the mobile app, and describe your idea in plain English, and Claude will translate it into functional code and package it in a clean UI. You can then click “Publish” and get a shareable link that others can open and run. You can even play around with and improve other people’s Artifacts if you have their link, remixing them as you wish. Feel free to do so with my creation.
