We hosted our first hackathon together with Ground: one day, one AI tool, one challenge. A room full of people who had never coded shipped playable games. The winner? Sumo wrestling ducks.
Last weekend we tried something new. Instead of showing up at someone else's hackathon, we hosted our own, together with Ground, a speaker event session we teamed up with for the day.
The idea was simple. Give people a few hours, an AI tool, and one challenge: build a game from scratch. Not a prototype, not a slide deck about a game. An actual playable game, before the day was over.
Here's the thing though. Many of the people in the room had never written a line of code in their lives. They learned to vibe code that same day, describing what they wanted and letting the AI do the heavy lifting. A few hours later we were standing there playtesting multiplayer duck battles, role-playing adventures, and games with enemies that actually thought for themselves. Some of it was impressive. Most of it was hilarious. All of it worked, more or less.
The winner deserves a special mention. Sumo Duck took the top spot: a multiplayer game where every player controls a duck and tries to wrestle the others out of a sumo ring. There is no deeper meaning to it. It's just really, really fun, and by the end of the day everyone wanted one more round. That's how you know a game is good.
In between the chaos we also had a speaker lineup, and our CEO Philip took the stage to talk about the future of AI and where all of this is heading. Watching him talk about what's coming, and then turning around to see a room full of non-coders shipping their own games, kind of made the point for him.
Big thanks to our partners GRO36 and Glitched for helping us pull this off, and to every participant and speaker who made the day what it was. You had to be there, honestly.
This was our first hackathon as hosts. It will not be our last. Bigger and wilder ones are coming, so keep an eye out.
