The Great Taxi Assignment

The Great Taxi Assignment

The Great Taxi Assignment is a retro-styled 3D browser-based taxi simulator that took home the top prize at the 2025 Vibe Coding Game Jam, hosted by Pieter Levels (@levelsio). Created by Tomas Bencko, the game beat out hundreds of other entries to win 1st place and $10,000, a remarkable achievement given the jam's rule that at least 80% of the code be AI-generated.

Gameplay

You step into the worn-out shoes of a taxi driver in a stylized, low-poly city. Your job is simple in concept but addictive in practice: pick up passengers, drive them to their destinations, and rack up fares. The aesthetic leans into a nostalgic late-90s arcade-driving vibe — think Crazy Taxi by way of PS1-era polygon counts — with chunky cars, flat-shaded buildings, and a soundtrack that sells the mood. Passengers wave you down from sidewalks, the meter ticks, and the city sprawls just enough to make every shift feel like a tiny adventure.

The driving model is forgiving but expressive enough to enable showboating: power slides around corners, shortcuts through alleys, and the occasional brush with a hydrant. The game runs entirely in the browser with no install required, making it instantly shareable — a key reason it spread so quickly during the jam.

Vibe-coded origin

The Great Taxi Assignment is a textbook example of what vibe coding can produce when paired with a clear creative vision. Bencko built the bulk of the game by prompting AI assistants and iterating rapidly, leaning on AI for everything from the 3D scene setup to vehicle physics to the passenger-pickup loop. The jam's 80% AI-code threshold was easily cleared, and the polish on the final product silenced any skepticism about whether vibe-coded games could actually win on merit.

Why it matters

Winning the inaugural Vibe Coding Game Jam put The Great Taxi Assignment at the center of a broader conversation about how solo developers can ship genuine, fun, complete games in days rather than months by leaning on AI for the heavy lifting. It is now one of the most cited proof points that vibe coding can produce work that holds up next to traditionally-built indie games.