I Made an AI Game Hosted Directly on the ICP Blockchain
I have the most exciting Internet Computer Protocol story I've ever shared today. I made an AI game. I used ChatGPT Pro to talk about what kind of game I wanted, then I put that through Claude Fable in one single prompt. The result is a game served directly from the ICP blockchain off of one single prompt that I made. Do you understand what a big deal that is? Jerry Banfield Games is my new creative outlet, where I have games that I make and comedy that I put up. I have so many game ideas — I want to make a bunch of games. But look at this game: this is a one-shot prompt. Every zombie has a crypto ticker on its shirt. That guy said HBAR. This guy says XRP. That one says Doge. There's another XRP. I'm slaughtering crypto zombies. That one said HYPE. AVAX, Litecoin. I've got a railgun and I'm slaughtering, and this is my 32nd round. The first two videos with my very first impressions of this game went up on my Jerry Banfield Games YouTube channel, and I'm sharing this with the ICP community here.
This is a huge thing. AI and gaming — user-generated games — is absolutely massive and bullish for the future. And right now, in my experience, the best place to host is on ICP, because what you need for a game like this is scalability and security. You need your game not to get hacked. You need your game not to get canceled. This is what you can do with a single prompt when you know you can host it on ICP. At this point, I can just crank out practically unlimited games on ICP. I can just crank them out, and all I need to do is load my cycles up.
What this setup does is serve the game straight to the web browser. It delivers a relatively small amount of information to your browser, and then you can sit there and play it over and over again. This is creating transactions on the ICP blockchain. When people realize that you can create your own games with AI, and that the ICP blockchain is an absolute dream environment to host them in, and that you can then immediately monetize the games on ICP on top of that — no other blockchain offers that. That's why I'm slaughtering all these zombie blockchains. There goes BNB, Bitcoin Cash, HBAR, XMR, LINK — dropping them, dropping zombie coin bodies up in here. This is a huge deal. This is an example of the technology in action: I am playing a game that I made with AI that is hosted on the ICP. It's like my business blog — I'm putting my comedy on there, my uncensored comedy, and I can monetize this immediately with ICP.
Built-In Monetization and Total Control
Right now, as I'm going about this, the games are just free. But what I can do is have something like a lifetime pass option. For example, I can make different versions of the games — just make different versions and leave the original version out there — and then when I make a new version, I can make that available first to people who have a subscription or a lifetime pass. So I've got immediate, built-in monetization. I have total control. I have decentralized hosting that's available around the world. This is a complete package, and this is why I'm so bullish about ICP: this technology is important.
I can't just throw this on Amazon Web Services nearly as easily. And with AWS I'd have to pay differently, whereas ICP has the microtransaction cycles model: whenever somebody actually plays the game, I get charged a tiny bit in cycles. Say some YouTuber sees this and thinks, "Oh cool, this guy made AI games," and shares it or shouts me out, and a hundred thousand people go to play the game. As long as I have enough cycles — maybe a hundred dollars of cycles sitting there — everybody can just play the game and it won't crash. This technology is super important, and it's important not to get hacked. If I just threw this on Amazon or something, I would be vulnerable: if my game went viral, first off, you generally pay for a server with a specific capacity, and the problem is that if you get a lot of traffic all at once, it'll crash. But then, if they don't like your game, they could take it down. And there's no built-in monetization there — whereas I can easily have the AI code built-in monetization with ICP, because it's on the blockchain. Do you see what a big deal this is? AI and ICP are coming together beautifully, as Bobby O talks about in his videos consistently. In this environment, all the narratives have gotten stronger. All the signals have continued to get better and brighter and bigger. And this is another signal right here.
Nobody Can Cancel Me — And You Only Need AI
I know some of you have made games on the blockchain before, but it's one thing to see what somebody else has made — it's another to go in and make it yourself. Holy shit, I just made this. And I can add sound effects. Imagine playing this game when I make another version of it, where every ten crypto zombies you kill, there's a Jerry Banfield quote — or Scarface quotes, I guess I can quote whatever I want. I can say whatever I want on this and I don't have to worry. I can talk a lot of shit, I can go off and swear and make obscene jokes, and there's nobody to cancel me. Do you realize what a big deal that is? Because if you try to make a game like this on Roblox, they're going to look at you sideways. Look at the Bitcoin boss in my game — we got a Bitcoin boss, and he fires bitcoins out of his chest. How cool is this? I wouldn't have known how to code that myself.
All you need is Claude — a $100-a-month plan for Claude — and you don't even have to keep that forever. I actually pay for the $200-a-month Claude plan, the $200-a-month ChatGPT plan, and the $100-a-month Gemini plan. I'm something of an AI tryhard — I use this stuff every day. It's a big deal. I could put sound effects in where the zombie says, "Now, little Jerry, time to die." I can just record audio files, dump them in, tell the AI to chop them up using the transcript, and then you'll be playing this and hearing Jerry Banfield quotes. I can go grab sound effects or make my own, so that every time the railgun fires it sounds exactly how I want it to sound — boom, boom — and I can make sounds for the colas being drunk in the game. I can literally build out this whole game, and then I have so many more ideas: customizable card games, tactical games. I can just create everything I want to, and then you can play all of it for free. And yeah — I got stuck on a desk in the game for a second there. Round 35, clear. Let's go. I have been playing this for over 40 minutes. Over 40 minutes — on a game I one-shotted with AI. It's that good. Do we have enough for the next railgun power? Oh my God, 800 points needed — we'd better save, because if we go down right now these zombies are going to annihilate us. These guys have five times 36 plus a hundred health, so they're at close to 300 health, and I'm barely able to one-shot them right now. Still, this is incredible. This is ICP.
Real Uses Right Now — Not Speculation
Somebody was telling me the other day, "Oh, it's just speculation." No. This is not speculation. I host this game on the blockchain. My friend Angela's website is on the blockchain. CryptoTechCap.com is on ICP. That's something like five websites I have on ICP now. Wait till web developers find out about this. Wait till people who have a bunch of clients find out about ICP hosting — because normally, if you're a web developer, you've got to put everybody on a shared server, and it can get expensive, and one client's website crash can affect all your websites on there. And especially if you're a solopreneur who might go viral: this technology has very real uses right now, today. Not speculative. Not hype. Game-changing — that I can host this on ICP, with AI building on ICP. It just makes everything super easy. I know James Allen was so upset about the developer experience — but you don't need a developer now. I built this fully on chain, and I didn't need a developer to build it. The AI models are so good that all you need to do is talk to them, and this made a fully functional game in a single prompt, just off of ideas I took straight from my mind. And it's real, on the blockchain, fast: I started this morning, and it was alive on the blockchain three hours later — between when I thought of it, when I dictated it, when it started building, when I hit the prompts, when I got it published, and when I got everything mapped correctly.
I can help you through all of this — I'll walk you through it. It is not that hard to set up. I know the idea of using a command line interface in Ubuntu can be a little scary, but it's not once we go through it together, and you should be able to make your own games. And not only games: on jerrybanfield.net, I'm able to sell my content — uncensored content where I can share my opinion on anything, however I want, without having to consider any censorship. This is the future, and I've come to believe you need ICP to build it, because of the infrastructure. If you can't put something like this on ICP, there are all kinds of problems — monetization being a big one. If you're trying to host this on Amazon Web Services, you need to bring in Stripe or some payment system, so you don't have built-in global payments. Whereas anybody who builds on ICP immediately has built-in payments. Do you see what a big deal that is for somebody in Indonesia, where they're not going to have access to Stripe and PayPal? And yes — Canton Network people are represented too. I just slaughtered that Canton Network zombie. And what the hell is that one — another XRP?
Instant Global Payments for Any Hustler, Anywhere
Yes — die, XRP zombie. This is so satisfying. And I'm ready to crank out changes: I'm going to add some white ICP coins that drop in here. Think about what this means right now: a young hustler — or maybe an old hustler — in Indonesia could drop something like this on the blockchain today and have instant, worldwide, global payments. And the more people and institutions build on ICP, the more it's already set up — stablecoins already set up as payment methods. You already have all of that ready; the infrastructure is in place. This is why the conversations in crypto have got to stick around what the technology can do. That's why I made CryptoTechCap.com. You need to focus on what the tech can do. The price goes up 20 cents in a day and people get excited — I mean, that's 20 cents. I'm not in this for 10% gains. This is world-changing technology.
Nice — we've still got one-shots on these zombies. I think we're going to keep one-shotting until around round 40 or so, but this could get complicated when we can't one-shot them anymore. Honestly, I'm wondering: could I make it to round 100 right now? I'm just curious how far I can go in this game. And it's so special because this game is mine. It's the first game I've made in my life, after 30-plus years of playing games. I could make my own sports game. I could make a basketball game like NBA Jam if I wanted to, and for the characters it could be 2v2, and you could choose from community characters — Bobby O, Blockchain Pill, Zero to Hero. Again, you can't do anything that remotely thinks, looks, or smells like this on any other blockchain. In my experience, you need the ICP blockchain to make this easy.
This Is the Marketing: Payments, Hosting, and Security Built In
And this is the marketing right here. This is the marketing: when people know this is possible, when developers find out — and I'm telling everybody on my Jerry Banfield Games channel — that you can go build a game with AI and throw it on the blockchain, with built-in payments, built-in hosting that's extremely affordable, and built-in security. Security would be a big problem if this were on Amazon and my game went viral — there'd be every incentive for somebody to say, "I'm going to hack this guy's game." But with this on the blockchain, you can't just fake an admin login. You can't fake an admin login to my website. And damn — I took a couple of shots there. I'm down 184 health. Good thing I bought 350. This is why you need the technology, and if you want to be relaxed in crypto, you need to understand what the technology does and why it's needed. This is such a big deal, and that's exactly why I made this game. I'm so excited to share it — I hope you can catch my excitement, because this is why I got into ICP: I could see that this was possible.
Now, here's what I didn't see coming. I invested in some of these crappy projects on ICP that were talking about gaming on a blockchain. We don't need them anymore. You do not need them anymore. You can build your own Web3 card game with AI straight on the blockchain. Something like Gods Unchained? You can build that straight on the blockchain now. You can build your own NFT marketplace, and then combine it with a card game — you can build that straight on the blockchain, and you can do it all with AI.
The Only Skill You Really Need Is Clear Thinking
The only thing you need to be able to do is think clearly. You need to be able to create in your mind what the game should look like — and damn, these zombies are hitting me up right now. Are they coming faster or something? I can't overstate how important thinking is. One thing I do well is think — I have a mind that's able to think through all this stuff. It took creative thinking to be able to tell ChatGPT exactly how this game should look, and then ChatGPT helped focus it into concrete details for Claude.
So I'm here: if you want to make something like this, talk to me. Or just play around — if you've got Claude already, play around, put it on the blockchain yourself, and show it off. I want to see your games, especially if you make a game like this. In fact, if you make a game, schedule a one-on-one call and show me the game on the call — and then maybe I'll play your game on one of my upcoming videos. At this point, I'm almost thinking it'd be better to do all the videos in my ICP Crypto playlist with gameplay like this in the background — because I'm able to play this at all thanks to the ICP blockchain. I don't know how I would have even hosted this without the ICP blockchain, and once you're set up on that command line interface, it's super easy.
I'm really excited about this, and I hope I've communicated that to you. Thanks a lot for reading, I invite you to come back for another Jerry Banfield post, and check out jerrybanfield.net if you want to play the game.