Retro gaming is being overrun with AI

Retro video games are everywhere lately — especially in places where they aren’t supposed to be. Halo in a web browser , Wind Waker on the iPhone , Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality . Over the past month or so, these kinds of unexpected projects have gone viral with incredible frequency thanks to new AI tools, as hobbyists take apart games and then rebuild them for new platforms. But while AI has supercharged the pace of these ports, it’s also tearing apart tight-knit communities dedicated to preserving games.

Decomps and recomps — shorthand for decompile and recompile — are a form of reverse engineering that involves breaking a game down to its building blocks and then rebuilding it so it can run on hardware it was never intended for. When done manually, it’s a slow, painstaking process. A group spent years decompiling the original Animal Crossing on the GameCube , for instance. But AI coding tools have cut that timeline down significantly, and the sheer number of ports has grown dramatically in recent months.

This summer, Chris Sotraidis, an AI consultant who works on game ports as a hobby, saw a port of Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour — which EA made open source last year — for the iPhone and iPad . The “technical challenges” inspired him to try making a handful of similar ports, including a mobile port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time using an existing community-built decomp of the game . Within just a few weeks, he was working on a dozen projects. He says that kind of productivity wouldn’t happen without the use of AI.

Meanwhile, at least one major name has embraced the decomp scene. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma set up an internal division called Xbox Labs to explore the space and “turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.” She noted, “While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life, and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators.” (Currently, the only thing the division has teased is an experimental dashboard .)

Some of those ports “would have been possible with minimal AI assistance if I’d had significantly more time,” Sotraidis says. “But I’m honest enough to say that the pace and volume would not have been possible for me without it. It would have been extremely slow by comparison. The tools allow you to move much faster if you know what you want.”

That speed has drawn many people to try out these AI tools, either for fun, the technical challenge, or for preservation reasons. It’s also a reason why there’s been what seems like a deluge of new projects popping up on platforms like Reddit, X, and GitHub. But these ports can be problematic from a preservationist perspective. One of the reasons why decomp projects exist in the first place is that users can pull a game apart and understand how it works, but that kind of understanding and knowledge is lost when AI does the work. Sure, you can put Spider-Man in a Batman game , but you probably won’t discover how certain programming decisions came to be, which can hurt the ability to restore games faithfully.

The rapid pace of AI-driven decomps has overwhelmed the DIY scene. Last week, a community-focused website that tracks decomp projects and provides various resources abruptly shut down due to AI’s impact. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way,” the site’s owner, writing under the pseudonym Encounter, said when announcing the shutdown . “What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken. Our projects have always been open source to encourage contributions and to benefit the community as a whole. Bad actors have been abusing this in increasingly troublesome ways.”