A novice video game developer created a flight simulator game entirely using artificial intelligence—and Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk took notice, praising the project and sharing it to his 219 million followers amid his recent claims that he plans to launch his own AI game studio.
On Saturday, entrepreneur Pieter Levels created a bare-bones flight simulator called Pieter.com Flight Simulator, in a matter of hours, by giving AI code editor Cursor a short prompt and some follow-up questions. He was amazed by the experience, despite the game itself being relatively simple compared to what’s already on the market.
“I’ve never ever made a game before, and just made my own flight simulator 100% with Cursor in I’d say 3 hours, by just telling it what I wanted,” Levels posted on X. “VERY FUN!!!”
Levels then went down a rabbit hole of improving the game, one step at a time.
Next he added balloons you can shoot, destructible buildings, and made the simulator compatible with mobile—again, all using Cursor. Then he added an afterburner and a Grand Theft Auto-style wasted screen with Cursor, and cleaned up duplicate functions with ChatGPT.
In this process, Levels enabled multiplayer but said he hadn’t figured out how to make bullets register to permit dogfights between players. With some help from other X users, Levels created a WebSocket server from scratch using Elon Musk’s own AI model, Grok-3. At its peak, the server was handling nearly 2,000 players at once.
Musk caught wind of a newbie developer making a game from scratch using AI tools, and said in a quote-tweet, “Wow, this is cool. AI gaming will be massive.”
Levels then added Mars to the game, because of the SpaceX founder’s fixation on bringing humanity to the planet.
Musk revealed plans for an xAI gaming studio in February, after showcasing a version of Tetris that was generated using Grok. The richest man in the world explained this move is in the quest of making “video games great again”—a nod to President Trump’s election slogan, and another step in Musk’s ongoing crusade against “woke” politics.
While the simulation shows the potential for AI tools to whip up functional game experiences, Pieter.com Flight Simulator lacks depth or unique mechanics. That’s all reasonable given the state of the tools and the developer’s own lack of game design experience—though the game has prompted snarky responses.
“I’ve never felt more secure in my job prospects as a senior engineer,” senior full-stack developer Max Yankov replied on X. “This is fine for a quick prototype. Making it actually feel and work nice for a lot of players will take about x100-1000 the effort and amount of lines code written.”
Yankov admitted that AI can be a useful tool for developers, though said he is just skeptical how far a coding newcomer can get solely by using it.
Levels shucked this criticism, called him a “gatekeeper guy who feels threatened for his future,” and then went on to add advertising and a pay-to-win plane model for $29.99 to the game.
“What if we sell blimps, what price should we charge though?” Levels added.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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