I played with Meta's new AI gaming engine reboot and can't believe how far it's come
Imagine you're scrolling through your Instagram or Facebook feed and see an ad for a game. I get these all the time and they usually catch my interest, but instead of just being a video to watch, what if the game was fully playable right inside your feed?
That's exactly what Meta is working on right now with Horizon Create, a total reboot of the company's Horizon Worlds platform that puts Meta's ubiquitous AI presense at the very heart of its brand new gaming engine.
I sat down with four members of the development team at Meta Connect 2026 as they both demonstrated the new tech to me and let me toy around with it myself, and I came away impressed.
Create what you imagine
Back in the day, I put quite a bit of time into Farmville. It was one of those weird guilty pleasures that was more enjoyable with friends, and it helped that it was built conveninetly into Facebook on my PC. I can't I've been quite as interested in "social media gaming" since then, though.
But Meta's new Horizon Worlds reboot is sparking an interest I had long forgotten about, and it all starts with how easy it is to make something. Like a normal AI prompt, you can start your first game with just a simple idea. Meta showed me a handful, but the one that triggered my imagination the most was creating an adventure game like Fable.
My demo began on Meta's Horizon Create smartphone app, which showed an Instagram-like gaming feed. Scrolling through the feed pulled up dozens of different games, from adventure titles to zombie survival games, crafting titles, you name it. Each one of these can be played instantly by just tapping it, and some of them even let you remix them, but I'll cover that in a moment.
While these games are AI-generated, they don't quite fit into the "slop" category that you might immediately think of. Everything in Horizon Create starts with a prompt, but the engine supports asset imports (so developers can bring in their own models and audio), and you can move, adjust, scale, or remix objects to your heart's content.
What's particularly amazing is that you can create things with friends, all while playing in the game world at the same time. During my demo, we had five people in the same world, all tasked with different jobs. One person was working on the weather, one was working on ground objects, another was working on building vehicles, and I was just running around shooting things.
I was also able to tap on any created object and freely adjust its size and position in the world, plus ask Meta AI to change the object in any way I could think of. Better yet, once things looked good, publishing it to Facebook, Instagram, or Horizon took just two taps.
This is a huge departure from current mobile game development concepts, even if you use AI like Claude to code something like a Roblox game. While Claude can be brilliant at coding, it can't do everything for you. I've tried my hand at making a few apps and almost always run into a wall because I'm simply not a coder.
Meta Horizon Create works fully in-engine and doesn't require 3rd party tools or SDKs to work. That means you don't have to use another AI agent and wait for things to happen; all prompts and changes happen in real-time as you're in the game, and it's pretty crazy to watch.
The desktop Horizon Studio app delivers even more options, as well. You can look at the entire development tree, including dependencies, delve down into each of the game's mechanics, and more. All of these can be iterated on, and it was pretty wild to see it all in action.
Meta has been working on this new version of Horizon only since April, so while this all seems extremely advanced, it's surprisingly early in development. They're expecting it to start rolling out early next year, but you can sign up to test out the new platform right now.