At its peak, World of Warcraft drew roughly 12 million subscribers to the fantasy realm of Azeroth. PointlessQuest, by contrast, peaked at 15 concurrent players on its launch day — and that is not a typo. The game is intentionally miniature in every respect, from its player count to the device it runs on: the Playdate, a small yellow handheld that is perhaps the last platform anyone would expect to host a massively multiplayer online game.
Developed as a side project by designer Gareth Williams, PointlessQuest nonetheless packs in many of the defining features of an MMO. Non-player characters hand out quests, a fantasy world teems with monsters, and players can accumulate loot and experience points. Early tasks include slaying slime balls and gathering chicken eggs, with a bow and arrow unlockable further into the game. The world is rendered in black-and-white pixel art, and combat triggers automatically when a player bumps into an enemy. The game even supports both text and voice chat for in-game communication, though finding another player online at the same time can be a challenge given the modest player base.
From Forgotten Project to Playdate Experiment
Williams is no stranger to the Playdate ecosystem. He previously developed the dungeon crawler Legend of Etad and the 3D space shooter Tau for the handheld, both of which he describes as successful within the context of the Playdate platform. The concept for PointlessQuest, however, predates the device entirely. Williams first began developing the idea in 2008 as a web-based multiplayer game played only by a small circle of friends. The project was eventually shelved and survived only in a backup folder that migrated across USB sticks, cloud storage accounts, and various computers over the years.
When Williams learned that the Playdate software development kit was gaining networking capabilities, he decided to revive the concept as an experiment. Uncertain whether it would even work, he turned to Claude to generate a modernized version of the original codebase — a process he says took just a few hours. From there, Williams set about redesigning the game by hand, creating maps, writing quest dialogue, and producing all the pixel art himself. He emphasizes that while the codebase is largely AI-generated, all of the game content is entirely handmade.
Built with AI, Crafted by Hand
The entire project took approximately six weeks to complete, a timeline Williams estimates would have stretched to at least a year if coded entirely by hand. He is candid about the role AI played in the process, noting that PointlessQuest would not exist without Claude, while leaving it to the community to judge whether that is a good thing. The game operates on a pay-what-you-want donation model, which has generated enough revenue to cover server costs indefinitely.