Robotron Was Supposed to Be Humanly Impossible. So I Built an AI to Break It.
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After teaching an AI to dominate Tempest, I pointed it at Robotron: 2084… and things got gloriously out of control. Robotron isn’t just another classic arcade game. It’s one of the most chaotic, punishing, brilliantly engineered games of the golden age—an all-direction, twin-stick panic attack running on a Motorola 6809, custom Williams blitter hardware, and the kind of game design that assumes the player is always one bad decision away from disaster. In this episode, I dig into my still-in-progress attempt to build an AI that can survive—and eventually master—Robotron. Along the way, I explore what makes the game so uniquely difficult, how its enemy logic and scoring system create constant tactical tradeoffs, and why this challenge is fundamentally different from Tempest. Tempest was elegant. Robotron is chaos management. Even better, I got to compare notes with Robotron creators Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, who were generous enough to share stories and technical details from the
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