AI Video Games + Cat Dog Wrestlemania

Dr. Ryan Ries here dropping some interesting AI news.

Last week, Mission’s CTO Jonathan LaCour and I co-hosted our most recent Ask Us Anything livestream.

If you weren’t there, one thing we discussed is the future of AI-generated games. Well, the future just arrived faster than even I expected.

Let me tell you about Oasis, the first playable, real-time, open-world AI model that's blowing my mind.

Breaking the Game Engine

If you've ever played video games (or built them), you know that every game needs an engine — the software framework that handles everything from physics to graphics rendering.

Think Unity, Unreal Engine, or the proprietary engines that power games like Call of Duty or Minecraft. It's been a fundamental part of game development since forever.

Until now.

Here's what's revolutionary about Oasis: there's no traditional game engine.

None. Zero.

It's just a foundation model generating an entire playable world in real time. This isn't just a tech demo — it's a fundamental shift in how we think about game development.

So, what all can it do?

• Real-time gameplay with physics and game rules
• Dynamic world generation
• Building and destruction mechanics
• Inventory management
• Object interaction
• 20 frames per second performance (that's massive for AI)

The Coolest Part

You can upload ANY image, and Oasis will transform it into a playable game world.

It's like having a universal game creation engine that runs on pure imagination. Crazy!

The Tech Behind the Magic

Oasis uses a combination of:

• Spatial autoencoder
• Latent diffusion backbone
• Transformer-based architecture
• Real-time inference optimization

This is particularly impressive because current text-to-video models take 10-20 seconds to create just one second of video.

Oasis needs to generate a new frame every 0.04 seconds — that's 100x faster!

The Future Is Coming Fast

During our livestream, I predicted that within a couple of years, tools like Unity with Muse would let users generate entire games just by describing them.

Oasis is proving that timeline might be conservative.

We're witnessing the democratization of game development happening in real time.

What This Means for the Industry

First, I think this raises some fascinating questions:

• What happens to traditional game studios when anyone can create their own games?
• How will the role of game developers evolve?
• What new forms of creativity will this technology unlock?
• Could this lead to entirely new genres of games we haven't even imagined yet?

And with Etched's upcoming Sohu ASIC chip, we could see these models running in 4K resolution with even more complex worlds.

Here’s My Take

As someone who's worked with AI for years, I can tell you — this is a watershed moment.

We're not just seeing AI assist in game development; we're seeing AI become the game engine itself.

What excites me most isn't just the technology (though it's incredible) but the potential for creativity it unlocks.

Imagine every player being able to create and share their own unique game worlds, limited only by their imagination.

So, what do you think? What kind of game world would you create if you could describe it to an AI?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time,

Ryan Ries

Now, time for this week's AI-generated image and the prompt I used to create it.

"Generate an image of an AI-generated video game where dogs and cats are fighting in a lucha libre style in a wrestling ring. Use the same animation style as Minecraft, and you can create the video game scene on a TV screen and have an actual person playing it. Title the game something to do with cats and dogs."

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