A couple of days ago, I came across a post on HN about a Tron lightcycle game. If you’re not familiar with the Light Cycle—shame on you.
If you were born after 2000, you should watch this clip:
If you’re from an older generation, say after the 1970s, then watch this:
And if you’re just 10 years old right now, this will do: [Tron: Ares | Official Trailer](
To give you some context: the Light Cycle battle is a fictional computer game introduced in the 1982 movie Tron - the first movie to use computer graphics at scale. The Light Cycle has some nostalgic and emotional value for old-timers. It’s not a complicated game. It’s just a game.
In the original movie, the Light Cycle game was shown as 2D, but later the main character is pulled into the game world and plays it in 3D. The mechanics are simple and resemble *Snake*, except the goal isn’t to grow a tail but to outlast your opponents.
Naturally, there have been countless spinoffs. The most notable one is [http://www.gltron.org/](http://www.gltron.org/), an open-source 3D network-ready game that spawned thousands of clones and inspired a ton of development. Building a Tron Light Cycle game is basically like building *Tetris*. It’s hard to screw up.
But someone tried.
I spotted this submission on HN a couple of days ago. Let’s dive in.
The entire game was committed at once. In fact, the commit message claims that Claude wrote the whole thing. Someone is very eager for Hacker News attention. Tortured-Metaphor calls itself a game dev studio, with an “impressive” portfolio of five Claude-generated games - one of which has over 35 stars.
So I installed the game. Well, not exactly - you have to build and run it with Cargo. Fine, I did that. After running the command, it took 32 seconds to build. On an M3 Pro.
Thirty-two seconds. For a 2D *Snake* clone.
When I finally ran it, it crashed in single-player mode. In two-player mode, I could at least press some buttons. After tinkering, I discovered the so-called “AI.” On easy and normal, it usually kills itself by making four turns in a row. On hard, you get about 20 seconds of gameplay before it crashes.
Then I checked the folder size. 1.36 gigabytes. That’s 282 crates just to run. It steadily chews up 30% of CPU and eats 300 MB of RAM.
And this is presented as an “easy” game written in Rust.
Sorry, but that’s basically spitting in Rust’s face.
Rust is supposed to be a C-level language for lightweight, blazing-fast apps. How do you manage to bloat a simple 2D game to 1.3 GB of source, crates, and build artifacts - with no sound, no video, no graphics assets at all? I’d expect that from some Unity throwaway 3D demo with cutscenes, but not from a broken *Snake* clone.
Wow. Just wow.
About four years ago, I saw a WPF implementation of 2048 that used 300 MB of RAM and took up half a gig on disk. To prove the point, I wrote a 7 KB assembly version of 2048 for Windows.
It builds into a 7 KB binary, runs in console, and uses less than 32 bytes of RAM for state. That was just an exercise—stretching muscles and learning assembly on Windows 11. Sure, it’s not perfectly optimized, but it works, and it’s tiny.
So, for Rust’s sake, let’s show some respect to game dev. It’s impossible to write a real game in one commit that drags in hundreds of crates doing nothing but wasting cycles. The only upside here is the reminder that maybe I should switch to the energy sector. With all the pointless computation going on in the world, the only tangible thing we’ll need is an insane amount of power to run LLMs and the junk code they churn out.
I’m not saying don’t use LLMs. I use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok daily. They make coding easier. But you still need to understand what you’re doing. You can’t just tell Claude “write me a game” and expect it to work. This game is anything *but* perfect.
The author claims to be a programmer, with a CV and a portfolio. If that’s true, why not spend 20 seconds searching WGPU?
Just take that and write a Rust app with it. You don’t need a full-blown game engine for a Snake clone. If you insist, you could even use an LLM to make a tiny engine that just tracks two key bindings and redraws the screen.
That would actually be impressive: a Rust Light Cycle clone running on Vulkan or Metal. Use Rust the way it’s meant to be used - for performance and control. That would be something worth posting.
But no. Instead, we get AI-generated shovelware dumped on HN for a few upvotes.