Bitmagic said that its AI game development tool has been able to create a version of the original classic game Civilization and other titles.
The game is the latest creation of the Bitmagic Creator. Jani Penttinen, CEO of Bitmagic, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the tool has created fully AI-generated versions of gaming classics including Civilization, Diablo, GTA2 and Vampire Survivors.
Idle Civ is an AI-generated idle game inspired by Civilization, one of the most famous games of all time. The game runs on the Bitmagic Game Engine, which has been designed from ground up to be an AI-first game development platform.
“It’s basically Civilization One, but we made it into a non-turn-based idle version, and it’s 100% prompted,” Penttinen said. “We wanted to showcase that AI is at a point where you can do real game rules, and you can do very complicated games that you can play for hours, and it just keeps, keeps playing and taking you to the next level.”
Idle Civ is a technical showcase that can be freely played at https://bitmagic.ai/games/idle-civ. No part of the original Civilization has been used or reverse engineered in the making of this game.
Bitmagic Creator is launching today with free access for professional game developers around the world, proving that AI is now capable of developing complex games fully independently, guided only by the creative input from users.
“Just 10 months ago, xAI was showcasing how Grok3 created a simple but playable version of Tetris mashed up with Bejeweled in a few minutes,” said Markus Hjort, CTO of Bitmagic., in a statement. “We’re now at a point where AI is able to build complex commercial quality games, including all code, art, and design.”
Markus Kiukkonen, Bitmagic COO, who led the efforts to build the record-breaking games, noted the significant speed advantage. In a statement, he said, “The original Civilization took more than one year to develop with a 10-person team. The Bitmagic engine built a new game with similar content and complexity in about four hours.”
Despite setting new records, the goal of Bitmagic Creator is not empowering AI to duplicate classic games. This effort is just to prove that the tech works, and to set the bar for what is expected from AI-assisted game development.
The creation tool is designed to use AI for prototyping, coding, and design, and it includes a full editing suite for developers to tweak and tune their games for perfection. The company’s aim is to restore game development to its roots and allow small teams or individual developers to create full game experiences.
Penttinen, one of the founding members of the game industry in Finland, said in a statement, “We see AI as a very useful tool that empowers game developers to use their creative power to the max. This is why we’re introducing a program that will allow game developers to reclaim their place in the gaming ecosystem.”
The Bitmagic Games Lab program is available to qualified industry professionals and is currently free. It provides up to $1,000 of AI credits for using the Bitmagic Creator tool.
Creators own all IP rights to their creations and are free to use and monetize their games as they see fit, with Bitmagic offering channels to assist with distribution and monetization.
This is ideal especially for everyone in the industry who have been laid off or are looking for job, or anyone who wants to pad resume and show that they ace the AI game, the company said. The application form is available at bitmagic.ai.
Bitmagic is an AI-first game development company dedicated to building tools that leverage artificial intelligence to simplify and accelerate the game creation process. The company is committed to empowering individual developers and small teams to create complex, commercial-quality game experiences.
The company said the Idle Civ game is a non-commercial, fan-made game inspired by Civilization. Civilization is a registered trademark of Take-Two Interactive Software. All copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights related to Civilization are owned by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and its affiliates, Bitmagic said.
This game is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or approved by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. or any of its affiliates. It is created for entertainment purposes only and does not intend to infringe upon any copyrights or trademarks, Bitmagic said.
Playing Idle Civ
I played the game and it feels like the original. You start with a settler and then look for a good place to find a city on the map. The fog of war lifts from the titles as you explore. I picked a good spot for my city by the shore, and then it gave me options of creating buildings like a lighthouse or granary.
Rather than play turn by turn, the game autoruns, so it stays busy as long as you select something for it to build. In no time, I had three cities up and running.
You can move on from era of Civ to another, bringing in new kinds of units and inventions.
Using the tool, the team described what they wanted. It built the code and started working. It was first built by Kiukkonen, the COO, who doesn’t know how to code.
You can make a basic game like the original Civilization, or you can do something that gives you beautiful modern graphics where it has complex game mechanics and hours of gameplay.
“I believe this is the way to the future for games for now,” Penttinen said. “I don’t think there should be hysteria over Google’s Genie 3. It’s not going to replace game companies anytime soon. It’s just not there.”
He said the team could have made it into a turn-based game, but they decided it would be better for mobile gameplay if it just ran on its own. The AI came up with the kind of historical items needed in the game.
“It’s very close to the actual feature set. You start with settlers. You’ll find a good place. You start a city, start building. You choose which resources to focus on, which inventions to focus on.”
Currently, the map is 64 squares by 64 squares, a little smaller than the original. It runs on a desktop or mobile, pretty much anywhere. The game ends when you get to the end of the inventions and run out of things to create. The original game used 320 x 200 pixel graphics. But the team went with voxels, which are 3D representations of a 2D image.
“There’s no human art. There’s no human code,” he said.
The company has raised $4 million to date and it started in 2022 and it has seven people. There are plenty of other AI gaming companies that have raised more money and have more people. But this team of game veterans had an early start and it has iterated.
Targeting professional game developers with AI tools
Penttinen said the prompts for creating Idle Civ were actually made with the help of AI chat bot. It starts by creating the basic world and the rules, what kind of game blocks we have, what rules they have for movement, then the general game rules, then more details. It’s almost like creating a design doc for a game and feeding it to the AI, prompt by prompt. That’s why we feel this will work especially well for game industry professionals, he said.
“We use a combination of AI models but the heavy lifting I done by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 which is the most capable coding model out there. Developing games is hard and we have made the choice to use always the best available models. So, no, the model has not been trained with Civ source code and while it has general idea what all games are based on publicly available material, there’s been no specific training on any given game. The secret sauce is our AI-friendly game engine which provides the AI all possible tools it needs for game development,” Penttinen said.
He said the plan is to get this in the hands of real game developers, including people who have lost their jobs, and to let them try it out and see what they can create.
“If you’re an artist designer, and you don’t know how to code, or don’t have time to code, you can use this to create a game,” he said. “We’ve proven you can do classic games. And if you can do classic games, then you should be able to do any kind of new games as well.”
He added, “Our idea is not that you will recreate the old classics. But you can use that as a starting point. Like, today, I’ve been prompting a GTA2, which is such a really fun game. “
He wants to see where it will go in the hands of people who have worked in games for years and have many ideas for games.
It’s possible the company may raise money, not to hire more people but to subsidize the cost of AI processing.
“If we can subsidize the cost to bring up the market and overcome the next roadblocks, or whatever that is, while eating the cost and waiting for the AI to catch up, then I think that’s that’s a good reason to raise money,” he said.
Ultimately, the company will likely try to make money based on a percentage of revenue that the creators bring in with their creations. And so to make a lot of money, the company will need a lot people using it to come up with the best games that players will love. He noted that players using Bitmagic will have a chance to have their game distributed around the world.
Will AI eliminate game jobs?
Penttinen said he is aware that people in bigger game companies are against AI because they are afraid that AI will cause them to lose their own jobs.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said. “People know what’s important. It’s not funny if it’s threatening their own jobs. What we try to do here is provide an actual game developers that developers can try by themselves without risk and see if it can be a very useful too for them to create something.”
They can create something themselves and distribute it and hopefully monetize it at some time.
“Instead of negotiating with 20 people or 50 people, or 100 people teams, maybe you can have a team of one, two or three people create a game and then have it distributed everywhere,” said Penttinen. “This is a mindset shift. There’s going to be less of these secure jobs and more in the type of development where people will create their own brand. I’m pretty sure that’s the way it’s gonna go, just like in the video industry with YouTube and the other platforms.”
He added, in games, “We just never had the chance before because games are so hard to make. But now I think we can actually make games that focus on the gameplay, story and all that. And the technology helps you get there. You no longer need to be a programmer to make a game. You can have just a great idea, and you tune and tweak it. It’s never going to be easy. When you create this kind of game, you still need to test it. You need to rinse and repeat. The AI will never make it perfect. So then you play it, you tweak it, you play it, you tweak it. But when you make a game this way, the AI writes the code.”
So far, in previous experiments, Bitmagic had more than 1.2 million people try the game creator. That approach was focused on consumers where they could create a game with one prompt.
“We found out that, well, the game players don’t want to do even that. They just want to be entertained. And creators actually want to tweak, and they want to spend time. They don’t want to have one product solution,” he said.
So this new version is intended only for creators. It’s not a “meme engine.”
He said, “We just want that 1% who are the creative people. We want them to tweak as much as they want. The experience actually includes editors as well. So once you have created your world with AI, you can go in and drag things and move them around, and you can actually manually tweak a lot of things as well.”
He said the team noticed that creative people are never happy with someone else’s work and so they want to refine it as much as possible until it’s their own creation.
There are a lot of competitors out there like Genie 3.
“I think what makes us different is we have been making games all our lives,” Penttinen said. “We are a team that is more on the game development than AI side. We do have some history on AI, but we are much stronger at the actual games.”
I noted that after Genie 3 came out, the stocks of some big game companies like Take-Two and Roblox fell. To that, Penttinen said, “I wish I had bought some stocks. They are back up now. GTA VI is going to be a massive hit, and Genie 3 won’t replace it. There is just no way.”