GPT-4 turns Pokémon Emerald into a text adventure

ChatGPT-4 is the latest artificial intelligence model created by ChatGPT. A smart person already discovered a new application for ChatGPT-4. GPT-4 is able to read code from the Game Boy Advance video game, as it turns out. Pokémon Emerald and turn it into a fully interactive text adventure, with the mechanics of a Pokémon adventure.

Follow Twitter Dan Dangond discovered that the AI modelCould run Pokémon EmeraldThe Game Boy Advance’s most popular game, “” was released in the United States in 2005. Dangond shared a screenshot-by-screenshot thread that contains their conversation with the chatbot. The game starts more or less as it would if you were playing it on the handheld — save for some some features, like setting up the clock at the beginning — but works as a fully interactive text adventure. Dangond “plays” the game by responding to the AI in chat.

As always with mainline Pokémon games, in Pokémon Emerald you explore a pixelated world and battle other Pokémon in turn-based combat, so the text largely describes battles and calculates them. The AI gives Dangond the option to choose from Treecko or Torchic starters. From there, the Mudkip is sent out to battle a Poochyena, which is an actual Pokémon you can battle on the first route.

The rest of the game runs like a rough text simulation that incorporates all the key mechanics of Pokémon, like type strengths and weaknesses. It makes several mistakes, like not correctly calculating that Nincada (a bug/ground) is weak to water. After playing through some of the games, it randomly decides to include accuracy calculations. It makes Rock Tomb attacks miss. The game skips several battles, and it misses specific beats.

It comes as many people still have questions about the capabilities of generative Ai. According to OpenAI, GPT-4 is a multimodal model, that is “ less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios,” but can exhibit “human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.” According to other tech journalists who have covered the technology, it’s supposedly more capable and sophisticated that its predecessor, ChatGPT, and it is acing standardized tests left and right. Now we can add running a Pokémon game to this list of skills.

ChatGPT-4 wasn’t created with running video games in mind, and it shows. If you want to play this type of game, it would be a great help to have played the original. It would almost be impossible to play without visuals and knowledge about the world. Still, it’s a fun discovery that GPT-4 can run this game in any capacity, and that’s where the potential for fun and more tinkering lies.