February 24, 2026
One of my 2026 predictions is that we're going to see a lot of interesting new experiments with LLM-powered games. There are just so, so many possibilities. The main barrier is inference cost. But that's dropping fast.
My friends Vanessa and Sunah have been tinkering with a voice game called Crush Quest.
Crush Quest has multiple characters, a bunch of really good prompting, and you can play on the web or (clone the repo and) wire up a telephone number. It's, you know, totally open source and that's radical.
As you can maybe tell from my hip use of slang, Crush Quest is set in the early 1990s. It's an homage to a classic electronic board game called Dream Phone. Check out the thread below for a link to the most perfectly 1991 TV commercial for Dream Phone. I can taste the Lucky Charms when I watch this commercial.
h/t to @chelcietay who I had a great conversation with recently about our 2026 predictions and where social and gaming is going.
Play Crush Quest[1]
The front-end is hosted on @vercel and the voice agents are on @pipecat_ai cloud[2]
Source code[3]
A 1991 Dream Phone TV commercial[4]
If you are building new things like Crush Quest (or want to meet people who are), join us for the monthly Voice AI Meetup on Thursday in SF or via Live Stream[5]