Robotron Was Supposed to Be Humanly Impossible. So I Built an AI to Break It.

After teaching an AI to dominate Tempest, I pointed it at Robotron: 2084… and things got gloriously out of control. Robotron isn’t just another classic arcade game. It’s one of the most chaotic, punishing, brilliantly engineered games of the golden age—an all-direction, twin-stick panic attack running on a Motorola 6809, custom Williams blitter hardware, and the kind of game design that assumes the player is always one bad decision away from disaster. In this episode, I dig into my still-in-progress attempt to build an AI that can survive—and eventually master—Robotron. Along the way, I expl…