This GTA 5 and Sonic The Hedgehog 'crossover' is an affront to gaming I'll never recover from

This week my eyes have been cursed with Sonic the Hedgehog, Tails ‘Miles’ Prower and Knuckles the Echidna tearing through the streets of Los Santos; this AI slop bores.

You may have noticed an avalanche of gaming crossover ‘mods’ on PC this month. We’ve seen Tony Hawk mixed with Call of Duty, Resident Evil in Elden Ring, and Minecraft in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. That’s just naming a few; there are many, many more.

Like many, I’ve been trying my best to pay them no notice aside from Minecraft’s Steve stopping the train in Grand Theft Auto V.

However, I’ve been unsuccessful in ignoring characters from Sonic the Hedgehog being ported into GTA V.

X user BennettWaisbren is responsible for this messy mash-up, and it sees Sonic, Tails and Knuckles from Sonic Adventure plonked into GTA V via Claude Opus 5.5.

By feeding it the necessary code, Claude can merge two or more games into one, and it’s kicked off what some, like BennettWaisbren, are calling “the golden age of modding.”

It’d be a compelling argument if you couldn’t do this without AI; because you can. GTA V in particular has been the home to loads of unique and human-made mods, including making Sonic the Hedgehog a playable character.

The difference is the actual mod changes your character’s skin whilst giving you a speed boost, whereas Claude’s take simply jams a Sonic from a different game in GTA V with no rhyme or reason.

You can see just how broken it is in the gameplay. Sonic and co. ricochet off the terrain and send cars flying as they run into them. It's probably fun for about 10 minutes, and it'd just get boring, so what's even the point of doing it?

We're seeing more and more of these 'fan-made' projects cropping up and they're very rarely good. The only one we've seen this week that we'd likely give a pass to is a Zelda SNES remake.

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Claude Opus AI is killing the future of game design

The thing that really irks me about these Claude ‘crossovers’ is they’re completely soulless. They serve no purpose whatsoever and are merely encouraging companies like Epic Games to bring more AI tools into game development.

The whole craze is just one endless loop of jingly keys. This week it’s Sonic in GTA V and next week it’ll be something equally daft like Spyro in Tomb Raider, if that doesn’t exist already.

My one hope for these AI slop showcases is that they’ll actually inspire people to make some compelling games. An indie about skateboarding whilst shooting people isn’t actually a bad idea. I’d play something like that if the assets weren’t blatantly ripped from other games.

Unfortunately, I find it hard to believe these Claude monstrosities will do anything other than incite more laziness in game development.

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