Pieter Levels builds a browser flight sim with Cursor in ~3 hours; it hits $1M ARR in 17 days
Pieter Levels, who had never made a game, asked Cursor to 'make a 3d flying game in browser with skyscrapers' and had a playable vanilla HTML/JS + three.js flight sim about three hours later. A day later the single 3,000-line fly.html file was causing Cursor problems. He sold in-game ads and sponsorships, and reported $87,000 MRR and 320,000 players 17 days in.
The numbers (as reported)
| Time to first playable version | ~3 hours (author's estimate) |
|---|---|
| Revenue after 17 days | $87,000 MRR (~$1M ARR) |
| Players after 17 days | 320,000 |
| Size when Cursor started struggling | 3,000 lines in one file |
Facts
- Company / subject
- Pieter Levels (indie maker)
- Tools
- Cursor
- Codebase
- greenfield
- Work type
- New product
- Stack
- JavaScript, HTML, three.js
- Published
- 2025-03-11
- Last checked
- 2026-10-18
Caveats
Self-reported on X. Revenue is from in-game ads and sponsors and owes a lot to the author's large existing audience, so it says little about the code. By his own account the build 'didn't go 100% smooth', with about 80% going well. A single large file slowed edits (15 seconds per change) and caused Cursor issues. MRR at a launch-hype peak isn't sustained revenue. Third-party posts also credit Grok 3 and other tools.