Sidewinder brings arcade spinning-wheel controls to a Super Off Road-inspired game

Why it matters

Sidewinder's most concrete feature is an arcade-style spinning wheel that Clemm says he had to tune by hand. The project shows AI tools in a personal game build without establishing how much of the implementation they handled or whether a public release is planned.

Josh Clemm, Figma's vice president of engineering for AI products, has built Sidewinder, a personal game project inspired by the arcade racer he played growing up, with a working version of the original game's defining control: a free-spinning steering wheel. Clemm posted a video on X on September 28th, 2026, saying he built the game with Codex, GPT-6 Astra, Blender, WebAssembly, Cloudflare and music from Suno, alongside what he called "a ton of human touch."

https://x.com/joshclemm/status/2104415561623257501

The post shows a prototype, not a public launch. Clemm said the full game URL was "coming soon" and did not include a playable link. He described the wheel controls as working in a reply, and said he had increased their sensitivity to recreate the loose feel of the arcade original. The post does not detail how the control is connected, what hardware it uses or whether the game is intended for commercial release.

The reference is likely Leland's 1989 Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road. The original supported as many as three players, with a steering wheel for each player; its tracks included one named Sidewinder. The International Arcade Museum's record describes the game as a competitive truck racer with wheel-equipped cabinets. Clemm's name for his project echoes one of those tracks, while his post points directly to the original's spinning-wheel control as a feature he wanted to reproduce.

Clemm's tool list is his own account of the build, not a breakdown of which tasks the models handled or how much code they produced. He identifies GPT-6 Astra as the primary model and names Codex, a 3D tool, browser-oriented technologies and a music generator in the same workflow. The post provides no development timeline, cost, source code or performance measures. Its clearest technical claim is narrower: the wheel input works, and Clemm adjusted its sensitivity by hand. That detail puts the emphasis on integrating and tuning the interaction, rather than on a claim that an AI system generated a finished game on its own.

The project fits a pattern in Clemm's work outside his executive roles. His personal project list includes Earthquake Alert, an Android app that he says has exceeded 2 million downloads, and Draft Punk, a fantasy-football draft tool he says he has maintained since 2010. He also built Yaddle, an AI-powered search product. Those projects span mobile software, sports and search; Sidewinder adds a game whose central challenge is recreating a physical arcade sensation in software.

Clemm joined Figma as VP of Engineering for AI products shortly before the Sidewinder post, according to his announcement on LinkedIn. Before that, he led engineering at Dropbox and Uber and worked at LinkedIn, according to his career history. His public writing has argued that progress in AI agents depends on reliable software engineering as well as stronger models. Sidewinder's demo offers a small-scale example of that view: the tools are part of the build, while the distinctive control still takes deliberate implementation and tuning.

For now, Sidewinder is best understood as a prototype and a demonstration of Clemm's personal build process. The announcement offers no price, release date, audience or commercial plan. Until a playable version is available, the working wheel controls are the project's most specific claim, and the part a viewer can assess only through the posted video.