Yuji Horii built a playable detective game in less time than it takes to watch a TV episode, and the technology has properly blown him away. While Epic Games' reveal that it's using AI for a new Disney game has fans and creators up in arms, Horii, who’s been making games since before half of today’s developers were born, says AI has astonished him.
When the creator of the Dragon Quest series has something to say about AI, it's worth listening, and this week he’s been astonished by a detective game he knocked together with generative AI, Claude.ai, in about half an hour.
It’s called Interrogation Room Komiya; it's all in Japanese, but Claude can translate. Horii shared it on X this week; it’s a small browser mystery where you sit across from a suspect, choose your lines of questioning, and then hit him with evidence until his story falls apart or you get slapped with a 'Contradiction' notice when pitching evidence. I failed my first go, but was told to "Serve tea to soften the repulsion, wait silently", which is always good advice. There is more than one way to attack and tease out a confession, and that’s the whole game; one Horii called the experience “truly astonishing”, as Nintendo Life reports in a VGC story.
Context is important here. In the early 1980s, Horii made The Portopia Serial Murder Case, another detective adventure, and he wrote the story, drew the pictures, and programmed it himself. Now he says: “By using AI, even if I can’t draw pictures or program, I can just give instructions to the AI and create a decent game all by myself.”
Keep a level head for AI games
Let’s not get carried away, though. Thirty minutes gets you a small mystery, not a commercial game release with all the testing and artwork and sound and polish that goes with one, and a working prototype isn’t automatically fun or original. Still, if you’re an indie dev with no budget and no team, or you’ve got an idea and zero coding know-how, being able to see whether it works before you sink months into it is huge, because that idea might otherwise have lived in a notebook or in your head forever.
The flip side is the bit that makes people nervous. If anyone can prompt a game into existence, what happens to the artists and programmers who spent years learning their craft, and to the junior roles where the next lot learn the trade? Nobody has a good answer yet, and for a while now we’ve known AI will affect game development, but we're still fumbling around with how exactly.
But Horii is the best argument for both sides because he knows how to pace a reveal, what makes a game satisfying, what to leave out, and what to develop further, and none of that came from the AI; it came from him and his forty years of experience and ideas.
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Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5.