On the Search for Quantum’s “Pong” Moment

Interview with James Wootton (Moth)

Quantum Markets

JULY 24, 2026 / BY VICTOR KERROS

The opinions, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of the interviewee(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers, affiliated institutions, or any organizations with which they are associated. The interviewee(s) bear full responsibility for the content.

Quantum computing is usually discussed through the lens of computational advantage: drug discovery, materials science, cryptography, etc. Moth is exploring a different frontier: media, entertainment, and gaming.

For James Wootton, Chief Science Officer at Moth, games may become one of the first ways consumers experience quantum computing directly by playing with music, graphics, and games shaped by quantum mechanics and running on quantum processors.

As part of our exploration of quantum markets, we spoke with James about what makes a game “quantum,” Moth’s new game Quantum Backrooms, and where the quantum game industry might find its equivalent of the “Pong moment”.

Background

Could you briefly introduce yourself and your work on quantum technologies in media and entertainment?

I’m James Wootton. I’ve worked in quantum computing for about 20 years now: first as a master’s student, then as a PhD student, then as a postdoc, then at IBM, and now as Chief Science Officer at Moth.

My PhD was on topological quantum error correction, and I’ve done a lot of quantum error correction over the years. But about 10 years ago, it all felt a little too sci-fi. I wanted to bring it to people. So I made a citizen science game where people could play a game based on quantum error correction and get a sense of what it is like to be a quantum error correction researcher, at least in a small sandbox.

That was the beginning of my work at the intersection of quantum and games. But I soon realized that I didn’t want to be constrained to games that help quantum, whether educational games or citizen science games. I wanted to look at what quantum can do for games: what hard problems in quantum computing are actually relevant to the games industry.

That is what I was doing partly at IBM, and what I am now fully focused on at Moth.

Quantum Games: Technology & Aesthetics

You co-authored a paper defining the “quantum game.” What is a quantum game, and what is artistically distinctive about quantum mechanics?

The first thing to say is that we are not talking about game theory. We are talking about games you might actually want to play.

When we looked at games that claim to be quantum games, we found several categories. Some are simply about quantum. They have a storyline inspired by quantum mechanics, but that does not necessarily make them very quantum.

More interesting are games where the mechanics are inspired by quantum ideas. People have looked at superposition or entanglement and decided that enemies could be in superposition, or that the player could be entangled with an enemy while attacking it. That is one direction: gameplay inspired by quantum mechanics.

Then there are games that are useful for quantum in some way. My old citizen science game is an example. These can be educational, or they can give people a sandbox for exploring some aspect of quantum research.

But there is a third category: games that are powered by quantum in some way. Some element of the process runs on a quantum computer. If you look at the hundreds of games we analyzed, most are either quantum-inspired or useful for quantum. Only a very small handful have touched a QPU at all, and most of those were by me. That niche is what I think of as the true quantum game: games that actually run on a quantum computer, or are quantum-powered in a meaningful way.

That is what we focus on at Moth.

For these games, the artistic distinctiveness, in the near term, before fault tolerance, comes from quantum dynamics itself. Quantum processes can do things that are unintuitive.

For example, I have collaborated for many years with a game studio that is using a tool I created for image manipulation. They are using it to generate encounters in a game: as the player moves through the game, when do they meet an enemy? In that game, the enemy is a super-intelligent AI, an alien mind. It is intelligent, so it has a process. It does not act randomly. But it is also alien. It does not follow the same logic that a human would. Quantum processes are interesting for that.

That is why quantum dynamics can be interesting to creatives in the short term.

Could you explain what are Quantum Backrooms and why it matters?

Quantum Backrooms is our new game. It is available in the browser, so anyone can go in and play. It is essentially a dungeon crawler with a horror aesthetic based around Backrooms lore. You explore a strange, shifting labyrinth. The shifting of that labyrinth is powered by the fact that we are sampling from a quantum superposition, so it has a quantum-inspired game mechanic.

But it is also useful for quantum. We are running a process on an entire QPU where it is easy to track where things are going well and where they are going wrong. In that sense, it is also a benchmarking process.

And the level generation is running on a QPU, so it is quantum-powered.

That means it saturates all three elements of what it means to be a quantum game: it is quantum-inspired, it is useful for quantum, and it is powered by quantum. It is an interesting experience because we are taking quantum and serving it directly to consumers. It shows that even now, with current QPUs, you can deliver some quantum interestingness to consumers.

It was not initially designed to be something so grand. It began as a quick demo to accompany a talk at the APS Global Summit this year and to sit alongside some of our scientific work. To build that quick demo, we used generative AI systems and created it in a couple of days.

But we liked it so much that we realized it could become the next big product. Generative AI really enables people to get their hands on quantum more easily. It allows someone to take a simple demo and turn it into something more sophisticated. On the creative side, combining generative AI with quantum processes is one way we will see many more people start engaging with the technology.

How do you envision users interacting with the quantum computer: live during play, or ahead of time?

You are not going to plug your game controller into a dilution refrigerator and play directly on a quantum computer.

The most real-time interaction you can imagine is something that happens during a loading screen. I like to say that quantum computers are like the tortoise rather than the hare. They win the race, but they do not do it quickly.

So for anything that needs to happen every frame, you are not going to use a quantum computer. But between levels, during a loading screen, there is a window where you could in theory query a quantum computer.

That could mean figuring out what the next level should look like. Or, in a massively multiplayer game, it could mean figuring out how to optimally pair players in the next round. Those are the kinds of tasks that could run on the timescale of a loading screen. That is the most real-time interaction with a quantum computer that you could have.

We already had a demo game last year at Gamescom where we ran on that kind of timescale. But I think most quantum use in games will probably happen during development. Developers will use quantum computers to generate assets, levels, or other content, and then those results will be baked into the game. That is closer to what we currently do with Quantum Backrooms: we use the QPU to make the levels, and then players play on those levels. The game itself is classical.

Both models are quantum-powered. If the world of an open-world game, or all of its levels, were generated using a quantum process — for example, a quantum optimization or constraint satisfaction algorithm — I would still call that quantum-powered. But in that case, the user is never interacting with the quantum computer. The quantum computer does not know what the player is doing.

If the quantum process runs during a loading screen, then the game can observe how the player is playing, or how multiple players are playing, and generate something based on that. In that case, the QPU is influenced by the players. That is a much more engaging form of quantum game.

The conservative model is probably more relevant for the future of fault tolerance and HPC integration: a studio like Rockstar could generate GTA 7 using a quantum computer. The more exciting model, for us, is where users interact with the quantum computer in some sense and get insight into what quantum computing is. We can do both.

Beyond aesthetics, do you expect to use quantum algorithms for optimization or image processing? On what timeline?

There is the run-up to fault tolerance, and then there is fault tolerance.

If we are talking about quantum advantage — actually doing something that would be computationally too hard for a classical computer — then we should think of that as belonging to the fault-tolerant era.

In that era, our current direction is procedural content generation: the algorithmic generation of levels and other assets. Classically, procedural content generation is not as good or as widespread as it could be, because ideally you would want to solve constraint satisfaction or optimization problems, and those are computationally hard.

We are aiming toward a world where quantum computers can solve those kinds of problems, and the question is: how does that increase the ability to do procedural content generation?

For that, you look at the roadmaps, and you find that this is at least around five years away: big algorithms, solving big problems, and powering things like procedural content generation. That is roughly the timeline we have in mind for advantage.

But even in the near term, quantum computers can already generate interesting dynamics. That is something we can use creatively today. We do not have to wait for fault tolerance to get going.

What scale of machine would ideal consumer quantum gaming need? Are some architectures better suited than others?

I do not really like setting a number of qubits, a fidelity, or a speed that I want.

The unique thing about going into the creative space is that even now, when quantum computers are not perfect and are limited, there are artists, musicians, and game developers who are interested in using the technology as it is, warts and all. There is no need to wait, and there is no need to say, “I wish we had this many qubits.”

The perfect number of qubits is the number of qubits you have. And we have qubits.

If we are looking for quantum advantage, then it is the other extreme. We need hundreds of good logical qubits and fault tolerance. But we are not waiting for that day before doing anything. At every point in time, we will make the maximum use of what we have.

Different modalities do matter. Superconducting qubits and trapped ions are the two big ones at the moment. Superconducting qubits are fast and noisy. Trapped ions are slow and extremely high quality.

If you are working on something like graphics rendering, where you need to use a complex three-qubit gate, then you need a trapped-ion device. The circuit depth required to create that gate is so high that on a superconducting device, you would get nonsense out at the end.

But if you want to demonstrate that level generation can run within the timescale of a loading screen, you need speed. Then you say: this is going to run on a superconducting quantum computer, so what can we do that still works well within the constraints of its fidelity?

Quantum Consumer Products

Classical gaming took decades to become a consumer market. Where is quantum gaming today? Have we passed the “Spacewar!” moment, and when should we expect the “Pong” moment?

If you look at the history of games for classical computers, in the 1940s and 1950s it was mostly a question of what games could do for computers. Games helped people sell vacuum tubes by implementing tic-tac-toe at a trade show. But you were not getting new game experiences from the computer. They were existing games, implemented in basic form on gigantic computer technology.

The change came in the early 1960s with Spacewar!, implemented on a PDP-1 at MIT. The researchers were figuring out how to code the machine, and they decided to code a game. On a radar-screen-like display, you had little spaceships that you could fly around and use to shoot at each other.

That was the first game you could not play except on a computer, unless you went out and were in a spaceship yourself. It was the first unique computer game. But you still had to go to a PDP-1 in the basement of a university to play it.

Then, in the 1970s, we had Pong: a game that justified the creation of a computer just to play that game. An arcade would essentially buy a computer so that people could put quarters into it.

It is sobering that the distance between Spacewar! and the first commercial success was about 10 years. That helps us stay honest about how soon these things can become commercial successes. But we also have the lessons of the past, so maybe we can use them to make things happen faster.

I would say we are now at the Spacewar! moment. I would say Quantum Backrooms is the Spacewar! moment.

It gives us a game where we are using the whole of a QPU – more than 100 qubits – to create the level. It is a sophisticated use of a QPU in a game. It is not just using it as a random number generator. We are guiding the quantum process to a particular state using our way of steering quantum evolutions, the Motte model.

And unlike Spacewar!, you do not need to go to the basement of a university to play it. You can just go to a URL and play. The way the QPU is hidden away is that we use it during development time, and then people play on the result.

But it is not yet at the point where it justifies buying a quantum computer to sit there generating Backrooms levels.

Because quantum computers are expensive, the conservative view is that you will not sell people a quantum computer to play games on. Instead, quantum computers could be used to generate levels in a massively multiplayer game, where those levels are used by many people.

You make it commercially viable by avoiding a situation where you use 10 minutes of QPU time for each player. That would be hugely expensive. But if you use 10 minutes of QPU time for a million players, the cost per player drops by orders of magnitude.

So I think the “Quantum Pong” moment comes when we are in the fault-tolerant era, when quantum generation has a quantum advantage and is therefore worth paying for, and when it is used in a massively multiplayer game where the cost is spread across millions of players.

If Rockstar used quantum procedural content generation to reduce the development time of GTA 7 by half, maybe GTA 7 would become the quantum Pong.

Do you envision a future where consumers own a quantum console, e.g. a “QBox”?

I can imagine a future where we might motivate Nintendo to buy a quantum computer to use in the development of games.

I do not imagine a future where Nintendo is selling quantum computers to consumers. That is not to say it will never happen, but it is too far away from what seems realistic now to plan toward that eventuality.

I would be happy to be proven wrong when I get my Quantum Switch in the future.

Beyond gaming, what applications do you see across media and entertainment?

There are other creative applications. Procedural content generation can be used to generate music. Last year, for example, we had a project involving an infinite mix of a song created by an artist called ILĀ.

There are also applications in the rendering pipeline. Not necessarily ray tracing on a quantum computer, but if you bounce light off a metamaterial, what will you see? If the material is sufficiently complex, you might need to simulate quantum dynamics to find out. That is another potential application.

So graphics, music, and procedural content generation are the main areas we look at.

There are also non-creative applications, such as fingerprinting and watermarking. How can people keep the images they have made secure and protect against plagiarism? There are possibilities that quantum effects could be used there too.

So quantum computing can also help with some of the less glamorous tasks in media and entertainment. I do not mean balancing the books of Sony, but tasks that are still relevant to the consumer experience at the end.

How do you foster a community around quantum games?

Reaching consumers is important to us. That could mean helping someone create a project that later reaches consumers. If we helped Pixar do some rendering and that reached cinemas around the world, that would be great.

Another kind of consumer is the person who takes our tools and builds with them. For those people, they need to understand something about quantum tools and what they do in order to get started. So bringing quantum to people, finding an intuitive way to program quantum software, and teaching people how to do that is core to how we build tools. We want to build tools that people actually use.

Our Motte model is one way we think about this: it could be an intuitive method for building quantum software. But we are not wedded to that specifically. If we find other intuitive languages that help people get their hands on quantum software, then that is what we want to do.

The goal is to help build a community of people who are adept at quantum and can build cool things with it.

Interviewee

James Wootton is Chief Scientific Officer at Moth, where he leads the company’s scientific roadmap and develops quantum computing applications for gaming and the creative industries.

He previously conducted quantum computing research at IBM, where he helped establish quantum procedural generation and developed tools such as Quantum Blur and QuantumGraph. He holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Basel. His academic work has focused on quantum error correction, topological quantum computing, and entanglement theory. In 2017, he created Cat/Box/Scissors, the first game to run on a quantum computer. At Moth, he explores how today’s early-stage quantum processors – and future fault-tolerant systems – could support content generation, artificial intelligence, optimization, and new creative experiences.