Jev Plays Pokémon Red
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Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemonThe game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
HN · launched Sep 25, 2026 · 280 upvotes (top 2%) · 0 views
Niche: gameplay automation tools · 67 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Agent / copilot
- B2C
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 67 launches in gameplay automation tools →
Could you build this?
Partial Streaming an emulator to a web page is straightforward, but engineering an AI agent capable of fast, cohesive decision-making over long-horizon RPG game states requires specialized RL or agent-architecture design.
What it would actually take: The stack uses a Game Boy emulator core (like PyBoy) wrapped in Python, interacting with an agent via memory-mapped state observation (reading RAM addresses for coordinates, battle states, and menu selections). The hard part is the decision policy: designing a low-latency hierarchical agent with spatial memory, pathfinding heuristics, and contextual state caching rather than relying on naive frame-by-frame VLM prompting.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenAI
Concerns raised: Excessive harness guidance and railroady choices, Model acts mostly as an RNG without state memory, Single-shot classifier ill-suited for multi-step RL tasks, Lack of intelligence compared to leading LLMs
Feature requests: Feed previous decisions back into context state, Integrate with a vLLM to view reasoning logs, Test on models with Pokemon training data abliterated
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 646 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #15 of 647 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 331 days after the earliest competitor.
- jev-pokemon · github · 2026-09-25 · 104 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Gametje · hn · 2025-11-11 · 112 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Snaketron · hn · 2026-08-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Shoot-em-up Deck Building game · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Phive, a Gomoku-like game to play with friends or solo · hn · 2026-05-30 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- 1D-Pong Game at 39C3 · hn · 2026-01-11 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I made a retro falling block puzzle, with a twist ;) · hn · 2026-09-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Voronoi Go · hn · 2026-08-27 · 158 upvotes · similarity 0.50
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