The opening mission of Taipei Rush, in which your cousin A-Ming welcomes you to Taipei and leads you along a city pavement. Image: MadRobot screenshot
A Taiwanese developer has used AI to build a Grand Theft Auto clone set on the streets of Taipei, and it has become one of the most talked-about games online in Taiwan. Taipei GTA is free, runs in a web browser and, according to its creator, cost more than US$10,000 in AI tokens to make.
The developer, who posts on Threads as aicodewithme and has not given a full name, released the game in late September. In an interview with TVBS News, the developer said it took about a month to build and that 1.2 million people were playing at the same time within three days.
GTA, but in Taipei
Anyone who has played the early GTA games will feel at home. You arrive in Taipei as a young man or woman with a little cash in your pocket and get drawn into a story about saving your grandmother’s old street from redevelopment, across 93 missions. Steal a car or punch a stranger and the police come after you, shouting in Mandarin, with up to five wanted stars, while a dispatcher reads out your getaway route over the radio.
The twist is how much of everyday Taipei is in it. The game-sized city takes in Ximending, Taipei Main Station, Taipei 101, Shilin Night Market and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, on streets with their real names. Traffic is mostly scooters, red lights and speed cameras actually catch you, you can ride the MRT, and the convenience stores are called 7-TWELVE and sell tea eggs. A note on screen says every brand is a made-up parody. The game runs in Chinese or English on a computer or phone, though the developer recommends a computer.
How popular is it?
Very, by the only measures available. The developer’s Threads post announcing the game has more than 100,000 likes, and the game was picked up by news outlets across Taiwan and Hong Kong within days, then by tech sites around the world. Players have flooded the comments with requests, from more of the city to Taipei Main Station’s notoriously confusing underground mall, and the developer has said it will try to add it.
The 1.2 million figure should be treated with caution. It comes from the developer alone, no traffic data has been published to back it up, and it isn’t clear whether it counts people playing at the same moment or visits over three days.
The game has no connection with Rockstar Games, which makes Grand Theft Auto. It has since been renamed Taipei Rush, and the old web address now forwards players, and their saved games, to taipei-rush.app.
“Not a demo”
The developer’s post set out the pitch in plain terms (the developer writes in Chinese; all quotes here are translated):
I really made a Taipei version of GTA. To make it, I’ve already burned through more than US$10,000 in AI tokens. It’s not a demo: you can play it free right now.
aicodewithme, Taipei Rush developer, on Threads
The developer has not said which AI models or coding tools did the work, or how much of the code a person wrote by hand. Some reports have linked the game to AICodeWith, a paid platform that resells access to more than 30 AI models, but the developer has not confirmed that.
Now Hong Kong and Kaohsiung
The game keeps growing. “After Taipei, Hong Kong is officially live!” the developer wrote in early October: players can fly from Taipei’s Songshan Airport to Hong Kong, change their money into Hong Kong dollars and take on missions around Central and Victoria Harbour. Days later came an in-game stock market (“Should you buy TSMC or UMC first?” the developer asked), and the game’s code now includes a Kaohsiung map, reached by high-speed rail from Taipei, which players have started sharing screenshots of.
Taipei Rush is one of the biggest vibe-coded hits so far, from the same wave that produced ArtCraft’s free Adobe look-alikes and Claude’s one-prompt Pokémon Red. Big companies want a share of it too: Google’s new Playground turns a sentence into a shareable game.
Why it matters
A playable, city-sized GTA clone built by one person in about a month would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago, and the US$10,000 token bill shows that serious AI-built software is cheap next to a games studio but not free. The player numbers rest on the developer’s word, but the response suggests people will happily play an AI-built game if it gives them something they can’t get anywhere else: their own city.
Sources: aicodewithme on Threads; Taipei Rush; TVBS News.
