It’s a wild time for retro gaming. Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined skateboarding in Call of Duty ? Or playing the original Halo right in your web browser , complete with multiplayer?
These are unofficial versions of games, so they may sit in a legal gray area. It seems unlikely that Nintendo, for example, is particularly happy about people finding ways to play The Legend of Zelda on non-Nintendo hardware. Many of these projects are also made with the assistance of AI, which, for some people, is a non-starter given ethical or environmental concerns surrounding the technology.
Below, you’ll find our coverage of gaming decomps, recomps, and all the other ways gamers are reverse-engineering games to go previously unimaginable places.
We have mixed feelings about AI , but 0:22 in this video made my inner kid jump for joy! This is what I hoped Magic Leap would be. Instead, it’s game reverse engineering bringing all my childhood dreams to life. This one’s based on the full open-source Mario64 decomp , says creator Lucas Martinic , with assist from Claude Opus 5.5. He says he’ll release a repo so people can try.
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.
The Nintendo Switch 2 has apparently been jailbroken, and a modder has already shown the console running a custom version of Mario Kart World featuring new playable characters like Cinnamoroll, the red Angry Bird, Peter Griffin, and Steve from Minecraft .
OpenAI’s Codex helped make this “ ns2jb ” jailbreak, according to Sammy Hajhamid , aka “pepsipu.” It’s a software-only, tethered jailbreak, which, in this case, means that you’ll have to run it from a game every time you turn the console on for it to work. This exploit requires the game SmileBASIC 4 , which lets users program and play games (though another modder claims that the title is “not strictly needed”).
This is so rad — and if you have a Quest 3 or 3S and a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee (1.02), you can try it too. It’s called Xelee , and yes, the mixed reality part is AI-coded: “Claude wrote every line of code.” The game part is from the Melee decompilation , though. I hope game companies are paying attention to the possibilities in this brave new world!
Digital Sun thanked Steam players for signing up for a first playtest of an upcoming game called ReVamp , but said that :
As stated on our socials , we’ve been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered , cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players felt like too big a risk for ReVamp.
The studio adds that “We’d also love to see platforms keep strengthening protections for original work , so studios of every size can keep sharing their games early.”
The website decomp.dev published a big statement following the recent influx of AI-assisted decompilations of games:
decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompilation: watching the progress go up was a fun way to stay motivated when every fraction of a percent took real human effort. Today, that same idea has warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game, exacerbated by folks who just want to burn tokens to make number go up or “port game to PC”, all else be damned. While the increased attention has brought in genuine folks who want to learn and contribute meaningfully, I believe that decomp.dev serving as a public index and leaderboard is now causing more harm than good.
Retro gaming is going through a wild time at the moment, thanks to decompilations and recompilations that are letting gamers port classic titles to new devices, or merge code from two different games into a single new experience. Microsoft has witnessed skateboarding being modded into Call of Duty and Halo being played in a web browser , and the company is now officially embracing the chaos of this new AI-powered era of game modding.
Microsoft is putting together a new Xbox Labs group to explore the rapid emergence of these mods, many of which use AI models to help modders remix games in ways we’ve rarely seen before. Xbox Labs will be a “small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience,” says Xbox CEO Asha Sharma . “We’ll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.”
You’ll need to bring your own PS4 game files, according to the GitHub page , but it looks like a great way to play Hideo Kojima’s infamous, delisted horror demo .
“I made this on my own, in my spare time, because P.T. deserved to keep existing somewhere other than on consoles that still have it installed,” the developer says on GitHub.
Titanfall has a special place in my heart . I’ve never felt such a rush in gaming since — leaping into the air with a jump pack, running on walls, summoning a giant mechanized battle suit that falls like a meteor from the sky, then letting one of its giant hands stuff me into the cockpit for a supersized skirmish.
How could that possibly work in virtual reality? It sounds like a formula for pain, nausea, distress. But no: Titanfall 2 VR is one of the top five VR games I’ve ever played — despite being a free mod, released by a solo developer, who’s only spent a single month working on it so far.
I’m finally playing Wind Waker for the very first time on original hardware — with my 9-year-old along for the ride! The controls and graphics are pretty rough on GameCube, though. This static recomp “BlueWake” looks amazing and runs on iOS, Mac and Windows… should I? Should I wait for the decomp ?
Take a look . It was “made possible” thanks in part to Valve’s ARM port of the game it made for the Steam Frame and with some help from Claude .
The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have 128 player Halo across Windows, Linux, and Android , you can also just fire it up in a web browser thanks to OpenHaloCE and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev: lots of people made this happen .
The classic game decompilation movement has produced yet another amazing feat: 1999’s Lego Racers isn’t just back, the excellent Mario-Kart -meets-Lego game is anywhere you want it to be. NavigatorSharp’s fan recreation Step On It works in a web browser on desktop or phone, and you can find builds for Android, Mac, Windows PC and Linux (including the Steam Deck) right here too .
I don’t have a first memory of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time because It’s been in my life for as long as I can remember. Before I had the coordination to play the game myself, I would watch my older brothers play it for hours on end. When I could finally play through it myself, it felt like flying.
I chase that dopamine hit once every year or two by playing through Ocarina of Time , which normally requires dusting off my old GameCube and hoping the disk isn’t too scratched to read. But for the last several months, I haven’t been playing Ocarina of Time on a Nintendo console at all. Instead, I’ve been playing it on something called Ship of Harkinian : an unofficial port of Ocarina of Time for PC that a few short years ago would have been unimaginable.
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