Lex Toumbourou asked Claude Code with Fable 5.2 to finish a beat ’em up based on his nephew Aiden’s drawings. The result, Aiden’s Revenge, became a four-player family game with twelve stages and eighteen characters after further playtesting and revisions.
An overnight run on an existing game
Aiden had drawn five heroes, twelve ordered villains and a Battle Wagon. A first version, made with earlier models and a side-scrolling template, worked but held the family’s attention for only a few minutes.
Toumbourou gave the agent the existing code and scans, access to image and audio tools, and permission to start over. He says it rewrote most of the code overnight, generated around 175 images and 140 audio clips, and created a bot to play through all twelve stages in a headless browser while checking screenshots.
The family supplied the feedback
Four PS4 controllers connected to a MacBook let the family try the game together. Owen wanted a Hulk Smash move; Aiden wanted a stronger special attack. Toumbourou asked Claude for both changes. They added more relatives and pet turtles as unlockable characters, using photos and family suggestions for their special moves.
The reported final tally covers two days, including further work: roughly 600 Claude requests, about 320 million cached-input tokens, 19 million cache-write tokens and one million output tokens. It also includes about 500 generated images, eleven music tracks, around 100 sound effects and 90 announcer lines.
Caveat: “One-shotted” describes an overnight pass on an existing prototype, not the entire project. The later revisions and family playtests matter, and Toumbourou did not test the same task with Opus 5.5.
The discussion
In the Hacker News thread, Simon Willison describes separate, informal tests of models asked to make games more fun. Other readers disagreed over which model’s breakout-style game felt better, and one player said the keyboard controls and exit path were unclear. These are individual impressions, not a controlled comparison.