On social media, a short clip generated by Midjourney earlier this month has racked up 50 million views as gamers salivate over the idea of a parallax pixel art fantasy game – but it’s not all hype.

The clip, generated by X user de5imulate last week, merely lasts five seconds but that was enough to spark a wave of reactions from people that’s still going strong.

“I would commit crimes to play a full game like this,” reads a quote on the post that’s been seen 11 million times.

Since it was posted, a number of game developers and fans have shared their own take on a similar concept, some of which are actually playable. Some follow the same striking art style, while others adapt the original clip into totally new aesthetics:

Part of the response to the footage has less to do with the desire for an actual product, and more to do with the way it evokes a mood. The visual of someone descending down a road that leads to an ominous castle is reminiscent of old-school games where graphics weren’t good enough to depict realism, so artists had to find other ways to express their vision. In turn, players had to rely more on their imagination to get on board with those retro games. When something looks exactly the way it’s supposed to, there’s inherently less wonder involved. You might be impressed that Hideo Kojima captured Norman Reedus eerily well in Death Stranding 2 for example, but you’re probably not going to think back on those graphics years from now with a sigh of nostalgia over how much things have changed. Realistic graphics are always getting better, but the improvements are now incremental.

The other sentiment fueling the strong reactions points to the nature of the image itself. It’s not a game, and it requires AI to exist. While some welcome the AI takeover within tech, some point toward the technology’s immense resource requirements. At current, some data centersused by AI pull more energy than entire cities. So the prospect of a game that can only exist with the help of AI isn’t appealing for people who care about the environment.

It’s also why people who recreate the torch visual with a twist sometimes take care in pointing out that AI wasn’t needed to do it. Developers are also highlighting games that already exist that hit a similar chord.

The AI of it all is difficult to detangle from the way people speak about the game. “Nobody seems to understand that you’ll never play anything that looks like this because this could only ever work as a 5 second animation,” reads one quote. To be sure, technology like Google’s VEO can create convincing content – but only for a few seconds.

That reality won’t stop people from trying, though. The creator of the original animation has continued posting concepts that could theoretically take place in the same world as the original image. He has spent the last week encouraging conversation in the hopes that people will share what they want to see in a potential game – and to recruit talent to help him bring it all to life.

So far, it’s mostly amounting to other small clips and stills. We’ve had examples of AI games that are ‘vibe coded’ by people with no programming background, but most of them are extremely simple. The expectations surrounding the viral fantasy game that’s being compared to greats like The Elder Scrolls might set a way higher bar than what Grok is presently capable of concocting, though.

“It’s a nice aesthetic, cool walking simulator,”one Redditor says. “At my age i’ve been burned by pre release video game hype too often.”