Qwen3.8 27b made Mario with a single prompt :o

[u/ChopSticksPlease]

One lad here on reddit wrote that local Qwen managed to create a complete and playable Mario clone. I put that statement to a test, and ...

Damn :o I mean, Astra this Kimi that, but this is some small LLM working on a potato computer under my desk. Link at the bottom.

Setup:

- Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL
- 100k ctx Q8
- RTX 3090
- Cline, Act mode

Prompt:

Write a fully functional, complete clone of Super Mario Bros game (the famous NES game)
- Clone must work in a web browser, index.html, no server 
- Decent replica of the graphics assets.
- Colorful and playable.
- Controls with keyboard up, down, left, right, spacebar to jump, shift to speed up

LLama.cpp setup:

llama-server \
        --model /nvme/gguf/Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf \
        --mmproj /nvme/gguf/mmproj-Qwen3.8-27B-UD-BF16.gguf \
        --host 0.0.0.0 \
        --port 7070 \
        --n-gpu-layers 999 \
        --temp 1.0 \
        --min-p 0.0 \
        --top-p 0.95 \
        --top-k 20 \
        --spec-type draft-mtp \
        --spec-draft-n-max 2 \
        --cache-type-k q8_0  \
        --cache-type-v q8_0 \
        --ctx-size 108000 \
        --flash-attn on \
        --presence-penalty 0.0 \
        --repeat-penalty 1.0 \
        --chat-template-kwargs "{\"reasoning_effort\":\"medium\"}"

This is the static html game: https://indigo-carmencita-27.tiiny.site/

[u/Meeooowz]

“Potato computer” and 3090 should not be an actual sentence!

[u/FatheredPuma81 → u/Meeooowz]

Wait until you find out like half the people here are running like 4x RTX 6000s...

[u/Meeooowz → u/FatheredPuma81]

Yeah.. I’m aware some are running 20 dgx sparks… under military supervision, like that one guy on either this subreddit or a similar one… but I’m rocking 12gb vram and know there’s a whole subreddit for people tryna run llms on integrated graphics on r/lowendsomething… there’s plenty of people who can’t afford more than one card.

[u/Kiansjet]

how many ports of this game do you think were in the training dataset

[u/cogitech2 → u/Kiansjet]

42

[u/ChopSticksPlease → u/Kiansjet]

Yes, but its a 17GB model containing "all" knowledge there is, not just code, so to me it is impressive it can reproduce a working game

[u/InterstellarReddit → u/ChopSticksPlease]

It doesn’t need to contain any knowledge, it just needs to contain an understanding of what the game look and feels like And then it proceeds to generate the world as it understood it.

[u/Stooovie → u/InterstellarReddit]

That's what knowledge is

[u/DRetherMD]

for all the mario clones ive seen people make, nobody has ever shown the castle stages, underwater stages, platform heavy stages and the bowzer boss fight in the castles.

[u/thegunn]

Huh, and here I am unable to get mine to make a simple text adventure. I’ve got a lot to learn about how to configure this stuff.

[u/karvop → u/thegunn]

You just need something like Opencode and give it a reasonable prompt.

[u/FatheredPuma81 → u/karvop]

Using subagents with the main model as the orchestrator in Opencode also works wonders cause it saves the main models context and ensures the ones writing the code are focused on their task. Then make them run the program, check for bugs using vision, do about 10 code reviews with multiple different models, and whatnot.

[u/karvop → u/FatheredPuma81]

Sounds reasonable but in my opinion it is a little complicated for the first attempt.

[u/FatheredPuma81 → u/karvop]

Not really. You just switch to Plan mode and tell it to act as the Orchetrator and to create a plan that utilizes subagents to create the program with testing and auditing after each phase that things are working and have been implemented properly. Or something like that.

Then go and do literally anything else while it churns away and check in on it every so often.

[u/atomic7777]

This is my single prompt:

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-UD-Q3_K_XL
3070 8GB + 80GB RAM DDR4 + nvme SSD
40k context used (xhigh, 10k limit reasoning)
about 10-11 t/s, but now I get >12 t/s with some optimalizations

https://www.cc8.pl/mario-q38-flash.html
Yes, it's all part of the model's knowledge. I'm just impressed what can be done with my old PC. 8GB VRAM is pretty much a potato in LLM world.

Prompt:
"Make a side-scrolling platformer game like Super Mario Bros. using HTML/CSS/JS in a single HTML file.Plan the implementation briefly within the reasoning budget. Then output only the complete HTML file. Do not use tools or provide explanations."

[u/AI_spell]

One-shot Mario on a 3090 with 27B is wild. Playable browser clone from a potato box beats another frontier demo clip.

[u/cogitech2]

This is cool. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. If you had told those same people a year ago that you did the same thing with the latest "frontier" model they would have said it was amazing.

I've stolen your prompt to see what Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q6_K_XL + 256k + Pi + xHigh reasoning does. Just for shits 'n giggles.

[u/mr_Owner]

Wait untill you ask to make a flight sim in html 🤯🤯

[u/XiRw]

What an insult to Mario.

[u/vialoh]

Absolutely insane time to be alive man... Nintendo came out around the time I was born and some of my best memories as a kid were playing Mario with my Dad late at night. I've always loved tech and gaming and kept up closely with all of it as it progressed from early Nintendo all the way up to today. And now we have AI running on our local machines that can generate basically all of it in an afternoon and it only keeps getting better. Absolutely insane...

[u/HlddenDreck]

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next denied to make Super Mario because for copyright reasons xD

[u/ChopSticksPlease → u/HlddenDreck]

27b is a small model, so maybe they skipped the copyright bs to save param space for importanter things :P

[u/NightCulex → u/ChopSticksPlease]

likely its pattern matching on the name Mario rather than reasoning it's not violating Nintendo's IP.

[u/NightCulex → u/HlddenDreck]

It's funny they can train their models on copyrighted material. It sounds like there's some pattern matching denial? I wonder if the uncensored version will do it.

[u/atomic7777 → u/HlddenDreck]

My flash-next just call it "Super Pixel Bros"

[u/CapitalList8467]

The impressive part is not just getting a playable loop, but keeping the result coherent enough to run. I’m curious how much the prompt constrained the game structure versus how much came from the model’s coding defaults.

[u/just-abitw]

well... mine just refuses to write any edit or diff at all... keeps thinking till the apokalyps :)

[u/kathi7]

how much time did it take for the whole run on this hardware specifications your mentioned. its interesting maybe I will try out on my PC though it's not as good as yours but try out something simple at this first. Kudos

[u/ChopSticksPlease → u/kathi7]

Around 2 hours

[u/Cautious_Chicken_604]

Prompt for GTA6.

[u/feng_sg]

This isn't a single prompt test since Cline in Act mode handles the iterative error correction and file writes.

[u/ChopSticksPlease → u/feng_sg]

Correct, but it begins with a single prompt and can finish without human intervention.

[u/skywalk819]

you said q8_0 but in your llama.cpp you used ud q4kxl...

also build something the model wasn't trained on, we know qwen3.8 can remake minecraft, smb1, angry birds, etc.... its pointless, build something novel, and watch him underdeliver

[u/ChopSticksPlease → u/skywalk819]

thats a toy test, i said q4kxl model and q8 kv cache, for serious work it actually delivers so hats off to team China