Robin Ward was recovering from a broken arm when he fell in love with The Roottrees are Dead, a free browser game hosted on itch.io, an indie games salesfront. He reached out to its creator, Jeremy Johnston, and told him, “This should be a bigger deal than it is.” At the same time, Ward says, he “knew why” it couldn’t be.
The browser version of The Roottrees are Dead used AI-generated art for its images, a central part of the puzzle game that tasks players with investigating dozens of people and filling out its complex family tree. At the time, Steam, the biggest platform for PC games, did not allow the use of generative AI in games released using the storefront. In addition, Ward and Johnston agreed that they felt it was “unethical to sell artwork created in this way.”
Johnston had originally released the game for free, despite spending 11 months building it up from what was originally a Global Game Jam project cobbled together in less than a week in 2023. In the jam’s tight time constraints, and in a time before generative AI was quite so well known, he reached out to a friend who was “super into” using Midjourney and asked if he’d be willing to generate images based on prompt …