After this game dev shared her prototype online, it took less than 5 hours for someone to post their vibecoded knockoff

Yesterday, game developer and technical artist Freya Holmér shared a glimpse at a side-project she'd been toying with: a rotational twist on Tetris, where dropping a piece into place rotates the screen 90 degrees towards the side where your blocks landed. "Been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype," she said. "Is this anything?"

The response confirmed that it was, indeed, something. At time of writing, the clip of Holmér's prototype has already been viewed on X more than 2 million times, while Bluesky users insist they "need to spend hours playing this." There's something mesmerizing about it: The brain yearns to rotate blocks that rotate other blocks. Hell, even Tim Schafer thinks it looks sick.

It took less than a day for someone to post a knockoff.

"Someone already vibecoded (a bad clone of) this and shared it online because we live in the worst timeline," Holmér said today on Bluesky. "Y'know it kinda disincentivizes me from sharing progress when there are slop ghouls around every corner, AI or otherwise."

Sure enough, I confirmed that, nestled amongst the clip's enthusiastic responses on X, there's a reply from a self-described "efficient novelty maxing generalist" insisting that "this can be built into a game by tomorrow." And just four hours and 39 minutes after Holmér's post, that user returned with a clip of their own rotating Tetris, freshly and joylessly extruded from the AI spigot.

In the video, which you can chase down in the replies yourself if you really think it's worth giving your traffic, the vibecoder casually admits that "someone showed a design of a rotating Tetris, and knowing how AI works and such, I was like, 'okay, it'll probably do something really interesting,' and it did. So."

Shameless videogame knockoffs are a tale as old as time, of course; once something crosses a critical threshold of attention, it's inevitable that clones will flood the iOS app store soon afterwards in a mad rush to capitalize on the zeitgeist. Since 2020, we've seen it happen to Lethal Company, Among Us, Wordle, and Unpacking—just to name a few.

But Holmér told PC Gamer that AI coding tools are accelerating the rate at which imitators can cash in on someone else's creativity.

"I'm a huge believer in putting intent and humanity into everything we create, and it's genuinely depressing how quickly people can steal work and release it on their own, with no recourse on my end," Holmér said. "It's like posting a sketch of a drawing you made, and 20 people show up to finish the drawing for you and then boast about it online."

Give me that

— @timoflegend.bsky.social (@timoflegend.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T21:25:38.570Z

While Holmér says already seeing clones of her prototype is disheartening, she admits the resulting spite can be a useful incentive. Still, the pace with which AI-accelerated sloppelgangers can proliferate is forcing her to work faster than she'd like, as she normally prefers having "time to explore the possibility space before committing."

"It slightly increases my motivation only because I want to prove them wrong," Holmér said. "But it severely increases my stress and feeling pressured to get my version out as soon as possible."

Before her copycats emerged, Holmér was still toying with basic aspects of the game design: When she showed off her prototype, she hadn't even pinned down what its win and fail states would look like. Now, she's scrambling to put a Steam page together to stake her claim. As she said in a Bluesky post, however, she figures that she has one major advantage:

"Luckily, these people are incapable of original thought and don't know how to elevate this concept beyond what they've already seen."