GTA 6 Recreated by AI: Ziwen Xu's Bold Bet Before Rockstar

Video game fans are eagerly anticipating the release of GTA 6 next November. However, Ziwen Xu, founder of the startup Hypercho, has decided not to remain idle and has embarked on an ambitious project: to recreate GTA 6 before its official launch, primarily using artificial intelligence (AI). He claims to want to create a game that can "exceed the ambitions and quality" seen in Rockstar's trailers.

Ziwen Xu is using a subscription to Claude Code and the open-source 3D engine Godot to develop his game. This choice allows him to bypass certain financial constraints associated with proprietary engines. The development is transparent and accessible to the public via GitHub.

Despite promising initial results, with AI agents operating continuously, 24 hours a day, to speed up the process, the project is facing challenges. The AI models sometimes generate incoherent content, such as skyscrapers from Los Angeles when the game is supposed to take place in Florida. Additionally, the project consumes a massive amount of resources, quickly exhausting the subscription quota: by the second day, about a third of the included quota had already been used.

Another obstacle arose when Anthropic revoked access to its Fable 5 model, further complicating development. Creatively, some experts, like Strauss Zelnick, head of Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, believe that AI primarily looks to the past. Human creativity, on the other hand, looks to the future. According to him, even if someone used AI to reproduce GTA 6, the result would never truly be GTA. Major video game successes often rely on unexpected ideas that are difficult to replicate with models trained on existing works.

Despite these challenges, Ziwen Xu's project also serves as a showcase for his startup, which offers "AI employees" to enhance developers' productivity. This bold challenge draws attention to Hypercho, demonstrating a keen sense of marketing.