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.
