AI Gives ‘Super Mario Bros’ Endless Levels For Hours Of Uninterrupted Fun

Calling all Super Mario Bros fans who can’t get enough of the game: say hello to a new artificial intelligence system that can produce endless levels to fight your way through.

‘MarioGPT’ was designed by a team of six researchers from Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, who have found a way to keep the gaming session going on and on. As detailed in the study, their model can generate endless side-scrolling level layouts thanks to the new AI system. 

According to Kotaku, a member from the team, Sebastian Risi, explained that the team first fed a “fine-tuned GPT2” model of all the original levels from Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros 2. From there, it learned how to turn text prompts featuring assets from the game, such as pipes, enemies, little blocks, and low elevation, into an endless stream of levels.

Does text prompting always work? It works well (details in the paper) but sometimes you do get some failure cases, such as in the example below: pic.twitter.com/7CeL7spLvf

— Sebastian Risi (@risi1979) February 14, 2023

Part of the experiment was also to find new ways to create video games that departed from traditional methods. For example, python users can find MarioGPT on GitHub for free, where fans can learn to make their levels for the beloved game.

[via Kotaku and PC Mag, Photo 202032196 © Mykhailo Polenok | Dreamstime.com]