You can just sense the Nintendo lawyers foaming at the mouth over this one. As announced by Google yesterday, access to its “Project Genie” AI service is now available to the public and with that comes an interactive world creation tool that will let players generate “playable” environments from a mere prompt. As the headline alludes to, this includes Nintendo copyrighted characters, with one user showing off a pretty terrible looking rendition of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
There is no map pre-loaded in memory. As your agent explores, Genie predicts and renders the path ahead instantly. Infinite exploration. pic.twitter.com/5lZzhFS6vo
— sammy (@sumiturkude007) January 30, 2026
In a report by The Verge, writer Jay Peters used Genie to create knock-offs of Nintendo games and… well, the results really speak for themselves. In its current form, Genie is able to generate “playable” demos that consist of 60 seconds of “gameplay” running at 720p and 24 fps. While I haven’t personally felt the controls of these games, it looks like there is a tremendous amount of input lag, something that Peters writes in his article. There are also no sound effects, no music, and seemingly no enemies or obstacles.
In that same article, Peters attempted to recreate Kingdom Hearts by using direct character names, but was stopped by Genie’s built-in prevention methods. When he changed his prompt to something more basic, though bearing resemblance to the idea of Kingdom Hearts, it generated what is basically a dead ringer for the series. When asked why he was able to generate Nintendo content, Google’s DeepMind product manager Diego Rivas gave a boilerplate PR response of, “As with all experiments, we are monitoring closely and listening to user feedback.” Rivas also stated that Genie was trained on publicly available data from the web. Shortly before the article went live, Google seemingly removed the ability to use Nintendo IP.
At the moment, Project Genie is limited to Google’s “AI Ultra Subscription” package, which runs $125 a month and includes other AI features for users to fiddle with. Due to that ludicrous barrier, I wouldn’t expect the internet to become flooded with AI slop games in short order. Still, it’s very concerning that Genie is able to simply spit out anything it wants, including clearly copyrighted content, without much hesitation.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
