today at 12:43 AM
> The act of reverse engineering and porting decades old games to modern environments requires a complex, deeply involved set of tasks from multiple disciplines... It's the quintessential deep, skilled knowledge labor profile out there that people understood as a career protected by depth of skill and knowledge acquisition.
Game development, especially this kind of porting, is an extremely technically demanding task. But it is far more constrained and precise in its requirements than the sort of software development that happens outside of the game world. Most developers deal with vague and (importantly for AI) unverifiable requirements that change continuously as a project develops. AI is not as good of a tool for this type of programming because unlike the tasks demonstrated in the article, there is no verification function an AI can cheaply use to validate if it is approaching completion of the task.
In the example in the article, the bots can look at the entire memory state of the game, interact with it to see how the state changes, and then repeat the process on their working copy of the port. So long as the overall behavior of the port is getting closer to the original, the AI can validate its getting closer to its goals. Extremely impressive stuff. But this verification loop exists in a closed world. No equivalent exists for most programming disciplines. No equivalent can exist because shifting the requirements to fulfill the vague business goals is an essential job of a software developer.
So while I am extremely impressed about what AI can accomplish every day, I also have a loud voice in the back of my mind skeptical of the actual economic impact. Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.
today at 12:47 AM
> Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.
Game industry generates hundreds of billions in revenue. There is plenty of value in it. The value happens to not be in decompiling 80s/90s games you have no legal right to sell, of course.
today at 1:43 AM
There is more value in remastering old games than you might think. And there always has been. One of my first gigs in the game industry was producing an Infocom Clasics CD-ROM at Activision. That’s games from the seventies and eighties re-released in the nineties.
today at 1:49 AM
If you have the rights to sell them, yes.
today at 1:14 AM
yesterday at 10:27 PM
Halo running in WASM at 120 FPS over a browser
https://x.com/mitchellhynes/status/2104658015605379094
today at 1:06 AM
Is not just games. I've already seen the beginnings of proprietary software such as Wolfram Engine and Microsoft Word vibed up into alternatives. How long till all of MS Office, Creative Cloud, Houdini get the same treatment? Truly exciting times.
today at 2:04 AM
Yes then expand to popular saas like jira etc, then photoshop. The potential of this sort of disruption was priced into stocks as “saaspocalypss” about may 2026.
today at 1:16 AM
Interesting, I did the same with an old RTS and it also worked very well.
But instead of cloning their assets and rewriting their code, a dynamic x86 to WASM JIT recompiler with some web platform support code proved fast enough to run the original binaries. It is even playable on an old Android smartphone in Firefox.
The final web player is ~600KB and only needs the game installer as input, so people still have to buy/possess the game. I think this is a lot fairer for the original devs...
today at 12:37 AM
I think we're going to start seeing a huge avalanche of remakes and mods of classic games. I've been working on my own modding of a classic game I still play and the experience has been both fascinating and surprisingly fruitful.
Like most things the majority of these attempts will be garbage but some will certainly pan out into great new or extended experiences.
today at 12:13 AM
I don’t think reverse engineering a commercial game is legal. I don’t know if it is right or wrong, or if anyone can stop it.
today at 1:56 AM
Up to this point, it has never been actively stopped. Except for Take Two with the PS2 GTA games, but that was a cease & desist, so it's not determined as "illegal" either. I think that it's legal as long as you're not decrypting stuff, but my understanding may be limited.
today at 1:04 AM
Might be against the contract, but that’s not illegal.
today at 1:40 AM
Something tells me you are not a lawyer who specializes in IP law.
today at 2:12 AM
If they can argue its copyright infringement, then you can be sued for it. Sometimes you can get away with just a rebuild of the engine without the assets (do not try to copy the assets!) but even then its up to the company's lawyers if they want to push it. Certainly if you try to sell your remake things get spiky. Can look at all the legal disclaimers on things like OpenSAGE as an example. But plenty of companies are cool, as long as they see no competition to their own copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engine_recreation...
today at 1:00 AM
Maybe I missed this but to me the economic implications are obvious: net loss for game companies, neutral for ai companies, win for gamers probably
today at 12:11 AM
reversing into a faithful modern implementation has a very important detail. everything complicated has an unambiguous unique reference semantics. there is no decision making on observable behavior of a program, just what the internal details of replication are
having that precise a grounding is literally what llms thrive in, esp across compactions.
today at 2:02 AM
He mentions GTA a lot in this post. I feel if he reverse engineered and rebuilt GTA, then attempted to sell the result, that would be a fairly interesting case study in all the ways porting a game from the 80s to JS isn't quite the fait accompli for AI he thinks it is.
last Saturday at 11:49 PM
Cross posting from another thread: 17 games fully or partially reversed and ported to the web by one very capable dude in a few weeks with frontier and open weight models. He also did this thing where he “spliced” different game concepts and turned WoW into an FPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652089
In case you mistake him for an “AI booster”, you should see this guy’s other posts, he is extremely critical of the AI frontier labs and Tech Bros and this whole AI bubble.
But he is also a very experienced game developer, and under his control the latest models have pulled off these crazy feats. What TFA is the analysis of a domain expert and what it means for the industry.
yesterday at 10:09 PM
Just so you know, the other submission you linked here got killed (i.e. is not visible without showdead on).
yesterday at 10:11 PM
Why was it killed? That sounds very interesting.
Does anybody have a link to it? I can't find it on the blog.
yesterday at 10:23 PM
Everything to linkedin gets killed, apparently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=linkedin.com
They're all [dead] (you'll need "showdead" on in your profile).
yesterday at 10:33 PM
Whoa TIL. Too much low-quality stuff being cross-posted from LinkedIn?
yesterday at 10:35 PM
Lots of would-be business influencer types post (or posted? I've never paid much attention to it) on there. There are a number of other sites that are also auto-killed by the system. Sometimes those submissions will come back to life, but it has to be found by a mod or vouched for by enough users.
yesterday at 11:58 PM
[flagged]
yesterday at 10:30 PM
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgzoeller_the-transformer-...
It works for me in an Incognito window, but YMMV.
yesterday at 10:40 PM