AION
Opinion / analysisReinforcement Learning · Agents & Tool Use · Hardware & Compute1 source · Aug 21, 2026

From Atari to EVE Online: Building on 15 Years of AI Research in Games

From Atari to Go to StarCraft, games have driven some of the biggest breakthroughs in AI.

Key points

  • Now, we’re partnering with game developers to prototype new gameplay experiences that push the frontiers of both gaming and AI.
  • Demis Hassabis, one of Google DeepMind's founders, is himself a former game developer, as are many of us in the GDM team.
  • We’ve always been clear that doing AI research with games requires deep partnership with game developers - like our major new research partnership with Fenris Creations and the EVE Universe that we unveiled earlier this year, and the work we’ve done together with acclaimed studios like Hello Games, Coffee Stain Studios, Foulball Hangover and others.
  • Our journey began when a small team trained a deep neural network to play Atari 2600 games directly from raw pixels.

Sources (1)

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