AI turns Pokémon Emerald into a text adventure

A clever mind has already found a unique application for ChatGPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence language model from the creators of ChatGPT. As it turns out, GPT-4 can read the code for the Game Boy Advance game Pokemon Emerald and turn it into a fully interactive text adventure with the mechanics of a Pokémon adventure.

Twitter user Dan Dangond discovered that the AI ​​model could work Pokemon Emerald, a popular Game Boy Advance game released in the United States in 2005. Dagond shared a screenshot-by-screenshot thread that includes their conversation with the chatbot. The game starts out more or less as if you were playing it on handheld – apart from a few features like setting the clock at the beginning – but works as a fully interactive text adventure. Dangond “plays” the game by responding to the AI ​​in chat.

As always with main Pokémon games, in Pokemon Emerald You’ll explore a pixelated world and fight other Pokémon in turn-based battles, so the text largely describes and calculates battles. As Dangond begins, the AI ​​offers a choice of the region’s three starters: Treecko, Torchic, and Mudkip. From there, the Mudkip will be sent out to fight a Poochyena, a real Pokemon that you can fight on the first route.

The rest of the game plays out as a rough text simulation that includes all of Pokémon’s key mechanics, like type strengths and weaknesses. There are several missteps though, for example it doesn’t calculate that the bug/ground type Nincada is weak to water. It also randomly chose to include accuracy calculations after playing through part of the game and misses a Rock Tomb attack. It also skips several battles and misses certain beats.

This text-based game comes at a time when many people are still feeling what the true capabilities of Generative AI are. According to OpenAI

, GPT-4 is a multimodal model that is “less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios” but can demonstrate “human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.” According to other tech journalists who have covered the technology, it is supposedly more powerful and refined that its predecessor, ChatGPT, and it is master standardized tests left and right. Now we can add running a Pokémon game to this list of skills.

ChatGPT-4 was not designed to run video games and it shows. Any person wishing to play the game like this would greatly benefit from having played the original game. Without visuals and a general knowledge of the world, it would be almost impossible to play. Still, it’s a fun discovery that GPT-4 can run this game in any capacity, and therein lies the potential for fun and more crafting.