Creator of Task Manager is training an AI to beat one of the most punishing arcade games ever made

Dave Plummer, the former Microsoft engineer best known for creating Task Manager and 3D Pinball for Windows, has set his sights on a new challenge. After successfully training an AI to master Tempest – the elegant 1981 arcade classic – he's now taking on something far more brutal. The new target is Robotron: 2084, one of the most demanding and merciless arcade games ever made.

Robotron: 2084 came out in 1982, designed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar. It's a chaotic top-down twin-stick shooter with 8-way movement where you control a genetically engineered mutant trying to rescue the last surviving humans from a robot uprising. Every level scatters civilians across the arena while dozens of enemies simultaneously hunt both the players and the humans. One touch kills either. Saving everyone on screen is simply not possible – the game constantly forces you to make the least-bad call at breakneck speed.

Plummer describes the leap from Tempest to Robotron vividly: "We've already taught one machine to dominate Tempest, which is a bit like teaching a robot to fence beautifully. Robotron is different. Robotron is teaching it to box its way out of a New Orleans riot." His description of the game itself is equally blunt:

"a screaming 1982 arcade cabinet trying to murder you with a hundred simultaneous bad decisions at 60 frames a second [and] a brutally compressed lesson in real-time systems, human limits, and the difference between intelligence and reflex."

Jarvis himself weighed in via email on what makes Robotron so uniquely resistant to mastery:

"Robotron leans heavily on forcing humans to do dumb things in two dimensions. Running into a robot while trying to avoid a projectile. Chasing a human one inch too greedily. Flipping an electrode while dealing with a brain. It weaponises the fact that peoples' resources are finite."

An AI has obvious advantages here – no panic, no fatigue, no adrenaline. But the real difficulty of Robotron isn't reaction time, it's the tactical layer where no correct answer exists. Plummer considers it one of the purest stress tests of real-time decision-making ever built into a commercial product.

Plummer is running a live training dashboard where anyone can watch the AI play Robotron: 2084 in real time, complete with graphs tracking its progress across various metrics. The irony is hard to miss: a human is teaching an artificial intelligence to save humanity from a robot uprising, inside a game built entirely around that premise.