Microsoft is experimenting with a new way to showcase its AI-powered future for gaming, but the results have left the gaming world a little… divided. The tech giant recently released a browser-based demo that lets users play a level of Quake II, not through traditional rendering, but through the lens of its Copilot AI and Muse model family.
Microsoft’s AI team has repurposed a single level of Quake II into a playable tech demo hosted right in the browser, serving as a proof of concept for its Copilot AI platform and the Muse model family. According to Microsoft, this isn’t a simple port of the 1997 shooter. Rather, it’s an experiment—”a research exploration,” as they put it—where players interact with a predictive model trained on Quake II content rather than the game itself.
The result is surreal: using your keyboard or controller, you can navigate the level, jump, shoot, blow up barrels, and for a few minutes, live inside an AI-generated facsimile of a retro gaming classic. “Much to our initial delight, we were able to play inside the world that the model was simulating,” the researchers wrote. But they were quick to temper expectations, acknowledging this is more “playing the model as opposed to playing the game.”
And the difference is noticeable. For one, enemies often appear as fuzzy silhouettes, and health/damage counters don’t always behave correctly. One of the more peculiar quirks is the AI’s struggle with object permanence—anything out of sight for more than 0.9 seconds might just vanish. On the upside? That kind of glitchiness can be weirdly entertaining. As the researchers note, you can “defeat or spawn enemies by looking at the floor for a second and then looking back up,” or even “teleport around the map by looking up at the sky and then back down.”
But not everyone’s charmed by the novelty. Writer and game designer Austin Walker posted a gameplay video in which he mostly wandered a dark, inescapable room—an experience many users echoed. His critique? Microsoft’s AI-based approach to reviving classic games reflects “a fundamental misunderstanding of not only this tech but how games WORK.”
Walker argues that what makes games like Quake II compelling isn’t just how they look, but how all the underlying systems—physics, logic, art, and audio—interact to create unexpected moments of gameplay. “If you aren’t able to rebuild the key inner workings,” he wrote, “then you lose access to those unpredictable edge cases,” which are often where the magic of games truly lies.
This comes shortly after Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer suggested that AI could be a tool for game preservation, allowing legacy titles to become playable across future platforms. But demos like this raise an important question: if the AI is merely simulating how a game looks or feels, but not how it fundamentally works, is that preservation, or just an artistic reinterpretation?
Despite the criticisms, Microsoft’s Quake II demo does hint at intriguing potential. It’s a glimpse into what AI might one day do—maybe not to replace the original games, but to reimagine, reinterpret, or even remix them.
For now, it’s not quite a time machine to the golden age of shooters, but it is a peek into the digital sandbox where the future of gaming may be built.
