TechRadar reported that Anthropic's Claude AI built a complete, playable clone of the classic arcade game Breakout in five minutes using a single prompt.
Anthropic's Sonnet 5 model ran at its medium setting for the test. The text prompt outlined a customized version of Breakout, asking the system to replace bricks with descending robots and the bouncing ball with a spinning gear. Claude wrote the software from scratch without manual coding, generating the visuals, movement physics, and game mechanics directly from the instructions.
Claude named the resulting web application Gearbreaker, organizing the software around two initial levels followed by procedural scaling. Level one features robots that drop on a timer and break with one strike before reaching a hazard line. Level two introduces tougher robots that absorb three hits. Clearing both stages transforms the projectile into a faster titanium ball and enables endless play with local high-score tracking. The game supports arrow keys, mouse control, and basic touch input.
Prompting required roughly two minutes to draft, while Claude took around three minutes to deliver the working code and export it as an online artifact. More than a year earlier, a similar project to build an Asteroids recreation with Claude required hours of iterative guidance and repeated back-and-forth prompting to produce a functional game.
Claude notified the user that generating the game consumed approximately 90 percent of the daily credit allowance for the account.
