The Game I Didn't Plan to Make

I made a snake game last week.

Not for a client. Not for a portfolio. I just sat down one evening, opened a terminal, described what I wanted to an AI, and twenty minutes later I had a working snake game running in my browser. Green snake, red apples, score counter, game over screen. The whole thing.

I showed it to my wife. She smiled, said "cool," and went back to do her own things. My kids couldnt care less. Nobody cared.

And honestly – why would they? It's a snake game. The most basic game ever made. The original hello world of game development. Every CS student has built one. It's as remarkable as a paper airplane.

But I sat there after everyone went to bed, staring at this stupid snake eating pixels, and I could not shake the feeling that something enormous had just happened.

Here's the thing. I'm not a game developer. I've never written game logic. I don't know how collision detection works. I couldn't tell you the difference between a game loop and a for loop until recently. Making a snake game – even a simple one – would have taken me weeks of tutorials, Stack Overflow, and frustration. Weeks I never would have spent, because I had no reason to. It wasn't my craft.

But that evening, the distance between "what if I made a snake game" and "here is a snake game" was twenty minutes. Not twenty minutes of struggle. Twenty minutes of describing, adjusting, and watching it appear.

I've spent my career around this kind of shift. At LEGO, I watched injection moulding go from something only trained operators could run to something a designer could prototype on a desktop machine. With 3D printing, I watched manufacturing move from factory floors to kitchen tables. Each time, the same pattern: a capability that belonged to specialists became available to everyone. And each time, the people who already had the capability shrugged. Of course you can 3D print a bracket. So what?

The "so what" always comes later. It comes when a million people who never would have made that bracket start making things no specialist would have thought to make.

Nobody is impressed by a snake game. That's exactly the point.

When the first personal computers appeared, the demo was always something trivial. A calculator. A blinking cursor. Hello world. The people who already had mainframes didn't see the revolution. They saw a toy. A worse version of what they already had.

The revolution wasn't in the quality of what the computer could do. It was in who could do it.

My snake game is bad. A real game developer would look at my code and wince. The architecture is naive, the animation is choppy, the difficulty curve is nonexistent. By professional standards, it's worthless.

But I made it. Me – a product manager who thinks in roadmaps and user stories, not in rendering engines and sprite sheets. I had an idea at 9 PM and a working game by 9:20. Not a mockup. Not a wireframe. A thing that runs.

Scale that to every person who's ever had an idea for a game, an app, a tool, a toy – and didn't build it because they didn't know how. That's not a small number. That's most of humanity. We've been living in a world where digital creation was gated by technical skill, and that gate is swinging open.

I keep thinking about the gap between what people imagine and what they can make. For most of history, that gap was enormous. You could picture a cathedral in your mind, but without years of mastering stone and engineering, it stayed in your mind. The craft was the bottleneck. The medium was the gatekeeper.

Every major tool shift in human history has narrowed that gap. The printing press. The camera. The word processor. 3D printers. Each one took something that required deep specialisation and made it accessible to someone with the intent but not the training.

AI is doing this for software. For digital creation broadly. And the snake game is my proof of concept - not because the game matters, but because the act of making it matters. A non-developer sat down and shipped a working piece of software in twenty minutes by describing what he wanted in plain language.

Nobody around me noticed. My wife was kind. My daughter was bored. If I posted it online, no one would care. Another snake game in a world full of snake games.

But deep down, I know I just watched something crack open. The same way the first person to print a page at home knew – even if no one around them understood – that the world just changed.

The snake game is my hello world. And hello world was never about the program. It was about proving the machine works.

The machine works.