Heroza Zhang of Gorest: “LLMs Will Never Make the Next Elden Ring” — Building the AI-Native Game Engine
with Heroza Zhang — Co-Founder & CEO, Gorest
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Gorest turns a napkin sketch into a playable, interactive 3D greybox in minutes — with zero AI-generated assets and full copyright ownership.
On this episode of 18VC, we sit down with Heroza Zhang, co-founder & CEO of Gorest, published novelist, and 5th-place finisher at the World Xiangqi Championship, on why prompts will never replace human taste, and how a Cornell capstone became a company.
Highlights
- The insight from interviewing game devs: creators hate AI doing what they're good at — but happily hand over “the general rest”
- Why Gorest started with greyboxing, the one part of game dev nobody loves — and what a “grey fox” in Zootopia has to do with it
- The 20-year analogy she uses on skeptics: C++ existed, but everyone still needed Unity. Foundation models exist, but you still need a new engine
- How a high-school hackathon in 2020 (as an accidental “team leader”) introduced her to VC before she could code
- Are we all just NPCs? The philosophy of simulating the whole world that drives her founder journey
About Heroza Zhang
Heroza Zhang
Co-Founder & CEO, Gorest
Heroza Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Gorest, an AI-native game engine that turns a sketch into a playable 3D greybox with zero AI-generated assets and full copyright ownership. A published novelist and 5th-place finisher at the World Xiangqi Championship, she started Gorest from a Cornell capstone.
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Timestamps
00:00 — Cold open & highlight reel
01:16 — Meet Heroza & Gorest
02:03 — “I want to understand everything”
05:42 — Games as interactive worlds
08:56 — The Cornell capstone that started it all
12:45 — Novelist, chess master, engineer: which built Gorest?
16:51 — The high-school hackathon that revealed VC
23:17 — Gorest in one sentence: your AAA kingdom, from your mind
24:15 — Why prosumers first
26:11 — Greyboxing explained (via Zootopia)
29:20 — Why not just a Unity plugin?
32:03 — Sketch in, playable level out
35:12 — No AI-generated assets — the copyright line
35:27 — Where AI stops and human taste begins
40:11 — Business model: B2B, subscriptions, the Unity playbook
41:14 — Defensibility vs. foundation models
48:16 — Competitors, Cursor-for-Blender & the blue sea
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