Retired Microsoft engineer trains AI to master Robotron: 2084

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer is training an AI to play Robotron: 2084. Plummer, best known as the creator of Task Manager and 3D Pinball for Windows, previously trained an AI to master Dave Theurer’s Tempest, and has turned his attention to the notoriously brutal arcade classic.

Robotron: 2084, released in 1982 and co-developed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, is a chaotic top-down twin-stick shooter with eight-way movement and firing. Players control a genetically engineered mutant trying to save the last humans from the robotrons, a human-created race of machines that turned on the planet—making Robotron one of Jarvis’s toughest challenges alongside games like Defender, NARC, and Smash TV.

Plummer says Robotron mastery is partly tactical, partly statistical, and partly an exercise in triage under uncertainty: the AI must not only dodge but decide what is worth dodging toward.

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