ChatGPT Got Schooled by a 1970s Video Game in Chess

In a quirky showdown between vintage gaming and modern AI, ChatGPT recently lost a chess match to the Atari 2600, a video game console from the 1970s. The match was orchestrated by Robert Caruso, an engineer at Citrix, who used a software emulator to run Video Chess, a title released in 1979 for the classic console. His aim? To see how OpenAI’s chatbot would perform against the retro system. The outcome was, in Caruso’s words, anything but impressive for the AI.

ChatGPT allegedly got “wrecked” by an emulated Atari 2600 in a game of Video Chess

The console is 48 years old pic.twitter.com/YaExEgSOY8
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) June 11, 2025

“ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed basic pawn forks, and kept forgetting where pieces were,” Caruso said in a LinkedIn post.

Even after swapping Atari’s abstract icons for standard chess notation, the bot continued to struggle. It made glaring errors throughout the match, revealing its lack of game awareness.

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“It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club,” Caruso joked.

“ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level.”

According to Caruso, the 90-minute game saw the AI so overwhelmed that it repeatedly asked to restart the match, clearly unable to cope with its opponent — a game from 1979.

Atari 2600 beats ChatGPT in chess match 🤖♟️

In a surprising technological mismatch, a 1977 Atari 2600 console with just 128 bytes of RAM and a 1.19MHz processor “absolutely wrecked” OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a chess match, as infrastructure architect Robert Caruso demonstrated when… pic.twitter.com/38KknpUxPE
— Vertrose (@vertrosex) June 10, 2025

There’s an obvious reason for this mismatch: ChatGPT is a language model, not a chess engine. While it excels at generating text and carrying on conversations, it isn’t designed to process game logic or predict strategic moves like AI tools such as Stockfish or Deep Blue. That’s why, despite its intelligence in text, it floundered on the chessboard.

This isn’t the first time AI and chess have crossed paths. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue famously defeated world champion Garry Kasparov, marking a milestone in machine intelligence. But ChatGPT isn’t built to replicate that feat. For those seeking a conversation about chess strategy, ChatGPT might offer valuable insights — but when it comes to gameplay, even a 46-year-old Atari might prove too strong an opponent. As of now, OpenAI has yet to comment on the game, perhaps still recovering from the digital embarrassment.

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