The Super Monkey Ball developers at RGG shocked the internet this week with a statement about a lack of human involvement in the next game in its beloved series. “The innovation in our upcoming titles will be driven by AiAi,” a series director said. “AiAi is the future of gaming, full stop. If we had our way, every game would have AiAi present somehow. There shouldn’t be humans involved.”
“I use AiAi to inspire my concept art,” a background artist at RGG told us. “But AiAi also usually heavily impacts my finished work, if I’m being honest.” Game Infarcer asked to clarify whether AiAi elements made it into finalized assets, and shockingly, the artist replied, “Yeah, I’d say AiAi is involved in every aspect of our games somehow.”
A 3D character artist said she always “keeps up to date with the latest AiAi models.” We asked about whether she uses tools like Gemini or Nano Banana Pro, and she replied, “I’m not sure what his star sign is, but I guess you could say AiAi is a banana pro.”
Game Infarcer asked if this commitment to AiAi would change the yet-to-be-announced upcoming games in the series, but RGG revealed that it’s actually been using AiAi technology since the franchise’s earliest days. “I don’t know why you keep bringing up ChatGPT,” a game producer told us. “Our AiAi usage predates that technology by decades; we’ve been using AiAi since the very first game. It’s really important for our business that all of our games use AiAi.”
Game Infarcer believes that it’s humans that make video games, not technology. With year after year of layoffs, it’s extremely important that the industry supports and embraces the people who create the games we love every day. When asking RGG about their commitment to human involvement, however, their response was not encouraging.
“What? That’s disgusting. Absolutely not,” the senior gameplay designer told us. “We will not be putting ‘human balls’ in the game. I can’t believe you would even ask me that.”
After we clarified that the humans would be inside the balls, the senior gameplay designer relaxed a little. “Oh, man. You freaked me out there. I think the fact that you put air quotes around the phrase ‘human balls’ threw me off,” he said. “We had Kiryu in there once, if that’s what you mean.”
