Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
Week 1 of Summer into AI 2026 — theme: 8-Bit America. Demo 3 of 3.
I watched RevereBike by Eric Rhea (@advisoryhour) pull mechanics from Founderman, Parade Candy Chaos, and Sky King into one mashup and ship it fast. That move — synthesizing what everyone around you is building — is exactly the kind of thing AI makes possible now. It gave me a different question: what if instead of borrowing mechanics, I borrowed ambition?
Hall of the Republic is a first-person Wolfenstein-style walk through 250 years of American history. You move through a pixelated hall and meet witnesses at their moment in time — a Revolutionary-era founder, a Civil War soldier, a suffragette, a civil rights marcher. You talk to them in free text. Claude generates their responses in character. They talk back using ElevenLabs voices tuned to their era. You can also speak to them with the mic button.
Theme connection
Wolfenstein-style raycasting is 1992 technology rendering 1776 history. That gap is the point. The 8-bit frame forces every historical moment into the same low-resolution box — a Continental soldier and a civil rights marcher rendered in the same pixel grammar, separated by 200 years but equidistant on the screen. The AI fills in everything the pixels can't say.
How the AI works
Three services running together:
Claude — generates witness dialogue in character, grounded in their historical era
ElevenLabs — distinct cinematic voice per witness (falls back to browser speech synthesis without a key)
Web Speech API — mic input so you can speak your questions instead of typing
The wall plaques show real verified facts. The dialogue is clearly AI — a historical impression, not a quotation. That distinction matters and it's called out in the game.
How we got here
Found a Republic (demo one) used Claude for everything — every decision called the API, every consequence was generated live. Liberty 1776 (demo two) flipped it: pure arcade, no AI at runtime, but built collaboratively with Claude as a coding partner. Both worked, but they were pulling in different directions.
Hall of the Republic is what happens when you push the AI-native idea as far as it goes. There's no game mechanic sitting between you and the AI — you walk up to a witness and just talk to them. The raycaster and the pixel art are the wrapper; the AI is the whole point.
Built with
Claude API (claude-sonnet-4-6) — live witness dialogue generation
ElevenLabs — voice synthesis, one distinct voice per witness
Web Speech API — microphone input for spoken questions
Vanilla JS — no frameworks, Wolfenstein-style raycaster built from scratch
Vercel — deployment
Where to play
Demo: hall-of-the-republic.vercel.app
Code: github.com/GlimmerForge/summer-into-ai
Week 1 series
Demo 1: Found a Republic — 8-bit civics sim — Claude reasons out every decision live
Demo 2: Liberty 1776 — Space Invaders meets the Declaration of Independence
Demo 3: Hall of the Republic — First-person history walk — talk to witnesses, hear their voices ← you are here
Summer into AI 2026 · Theme 1: 8-Bit America · Competitor reference: RevereBike by @advisoryhour
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://jakestrait5.substack.com/p/summer-into-ai-2026-hall-of-the-republic.