In the 1995 movie Hackers, “The Gibson” is a fictional corporate supercomputer mainframe owned by the oil and mineral conglomerate Ellingson Minerals. It is widely regarded within the movie’s universe as an elite, incredibly secure, and supposedly unhackable system.
That’s where you come in.
In this online simulation, you’re one of the team of Hackers who are trying to get into the Gibson to steal a file named “Garbage”, which contains part of the Da Vinci virus that the villain of the movie is planning to use to capsize five oil tankers, creating a planet-wide environmental disaster. The name of the mainframe, “Gibson”, is a tribute to William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer in 1984 and coined the terms ‘cyberspace’ and the genre ‘cyberpunk’, the latter of which he has tried valiantly to distance himself.
Each of the character roles in the game has a different special skill that makes the discovery of the Da Vinci virus easier in different ways. The interface features a 3d view of cyberspace in the left panel, and various status feeds on the right. Flying through cyberspace is done with the WASD key cluster and the mouse. Your task is to find the “Garbage” file, which contains the fragment of the Da Vinci virus. Find it before the tracers find you. You can even do it while listening to the riveting soundtrack of the Hackers film itself.
Mark Fulton is a self-described “solopreneur”. He is an AI entrepreneur and educator. He sells services related to agentic AI on his various web sites, and offers consulting to businesses who are ready to add artificial intelligence to their information management workflows.
That an AI was used to create this game is the entire point.
Could Fulton have learned to code and produced a game of this caliber himself in that time? Quite possibly. Would he have? Quite probably not. The effort would have to have been financially sustainable, and without AI, it wouldn’t have been. The game would simply never have existed.
Noteworthy is the fact that Fulton makes no claim of ownership of intellectual property over the game. Beyond the essential fact that it is based on unlicensed intellectual property, the answer to the question of whether games or other creative content that are AI generated can be copyrighted seems to be leaning towards “no”. That said, access to the game is being given away for free.
The original film Hackers was released in 1995 by United Artists. It was written by Rafael Moreu and directed by Iain Softley, and starred Jonny Lee Miller, Fisher Stevens, Lorraine Bracco, and a very young Angelina Jolie.
