It sounds like your agents were allowed to directly read the old code and implement it as new code.
Technically this is a violation of the rules for reverse engineering. You need a gap between the agents that look at the old code and the agents that implement the new code. With an English spec connecting them.
Interestingly, that's also easy to do with agents. And apparently legal. Our entire system of software copyrights is hanging in the balance.
Crazy days.
EDIT: I heartily apologize for citing the rules for a clean-room implementation. I shall never try to explain anything to HN again.
Yeah I have zero desire to play an OpenGL typescript web game
If you're gonna vibecode based on a decomp of a native desktop app you might as well make something with Rust and WASM/WebGPU that performs well and feels native
Opus 5.5 made me a launcher for Red Alert 2 that skips all the menus and directly lands in the game with perfect resolution and very good performance. It even fixed a lot of bugs with the game and added some custom units and a lot of balancing. I didn't publish it anywhere because of copyright worries, and everyone can do this with a couple of prompts anyway.
BTW, for the balancing tests, it decoupled rendering from game logic and can run 32 parallel games under my good old 3950X.
I wonder if it would be possible to fix Deadly Premonition's buggy pc port. I've played a few hours, then it started to always crash after opening it, I tested everything I could think of and never got it running again.
Opus 5.5 is probably as big of a leap as Opus 4.5 which is interesting when Opus 4 and Opus 5 were both huge disappointments.
Also this has some legal challenges, but who cares. I wonder how we're going to deal with information laundering that is enabled by AI since there's virtually no difference replicating input 2 output and rebuilding functionality from assembly.
from a programmer/technical perspective, very cool and technically impressive. gonna have to try this myself with opus 5.5
from a consumer perspective, I don't think I fully know why yet, but I just don't have a desire to play any of these AI generated games. I'm curious what other people here think (even if we're all little bias here due to our technical curiosity - very curious what you think)? like, I generally feel that because the technical execution for something like is diminishing to zero, the half of me that likes to play and look out for new games doesn't really see why this is special or interesting? I too have ideas and can put a couple hundred dollars into opus 5.5 and get it to make an entire game. once this all becomes normalized and everything from games, to books, to movies, tv shows, etc become something that can just be generated at a good enough quality that I wouldn't know the difference between a person and machine, I guess what is the point of any of this? I feel like knowing that a machine made this instantly reminds me that literally nothing about this matters. a lot of the joy behind getting into something like a game or book was to be able to celebrate someone’s hard work and to be apart of a community and or talk to like minded people about someone’s works.
and I want to be clear, none of this is criticism towards the demo here - the demo is cool. I'm just also curious what people think the 2nd/3rd/4th order effects will be when making anything becomes so normal, that it's just another part of your day-to-day? I guess, I'm kind of searching for an answer to the question of why should I really care about this if it's all a zero sum game and a race to the bottom?
i think the main thing is intent, an llm does not have it, only the human behind it. we all hate slop where the human put no effort into the project, mainly because there is no real intent there. but i don't see an issue with a game where the developer used an llm to build it, but put in the effort to make sure the game plays well, has good mechanics, is fun, etc. that's the part that humans are good at anyways, we are comparatively bad at typing code which to me isn't very interesting anyways.
yep this stuff is super interesting. we're seeing rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], and mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5]. there is a large active discord community of gamers and modders sharing tips and guides on how to do this. none of them are really programmers, they're just sharing prompts and codex/claude code does the rest. i don't think llm's are capable of designing new games but they're wizards at reverse-engineering and mashing up existing games, which kind of makes sense for a computer.
no i just mean i don't think they're creative enough that you can say "computah, make me an indie hit". you can absolutely use it to implement your own novel designs tho.
>Had to make the difficult decision today to lay off the entire studio after play testers said our game was ‘too good’. Will start again with a new team to help avoid creating a mainstream game.
>Imagine a game where the main character forgets important information and abilities if you take too long a break from playing.
>Imagine if refunding a game was part of the game. The only way to see the true ending is to send it and receive a video link within your receipt.
>Imagine a game where your character has the ability to switch between different patches of the game in real-time.
>Announcement. My new game will be delayed by 9 months to add polish. This new groundbreaking feature allows the player to polish absolutely anything in a world that is continuously gathering dirt in real-time.
>Excited about creating a remake of one of my games, I just need to finish creating the original first
>I’m about to redefine a new genre of game that has yet to defined.
>Imagine a Metroidvania style game where you lose all emotions and have to slowly gain them all back again, using each one to discover new depths to your inner soul
>My new game is so advanced that it will recognize if you are trying to speed run and make the game longer as a consequence
>Imagine a game where you can access the credits at any time and rearrange it to change your experience. For example putting programmers under art turns the environment into cubes which may be useful for accessing new areas
>Imagine a game that uses music to confuse you. Playing uplifting music during sad moments or scary music during funny moments etc
Between the people yelling "you didn't do this" and the people yelling "stop trying to shirk responsibility saying the LLM is doing this" a guy can't catch a break.
I have exactly zero proof and half tongue in cheek, but “Frontier models were trained on decompiled copyrighted binaries” wouldn’t be the strangest 2026 AI headline.
Technically this is a violation of the rules for reverse engineering. You need a gap between the agents that look at the old code and the agents that implement the new code. With an English spec connecting them.
Interestingly, that's also easy to do with agents. And apparently legal. Our entire system of software copyrights is hanging in the balance.
Crazy days.
EDIT: I heartily apologize for citing the rules for a clean-room implementation. I shall never try to explain anything to HN again.
If you're gonna vibecode based on a decomp of a native desktop app you might as well make something with Rust and WASM/WebGPU that performs well and feels native
BTW, for the balancing tests, it decoupled rendering from game logic and can run 32 parallel games under my good old 3950X.
https://imgur.com/a/uEretZ0
What I'm trying to say is, after seeing that, I think this doesn't surprise me at all. Just a couple of week ago this would have blown my mind.
Also this has some legal challenges, but who cares. I wonder how we're going to deal with information laundering that is enabled by AI since there's virtually no difference replicating input 2 output and rebuilding functionality from assembly.
from a consumer perspective, I don't think I fully know why yet, but I just don't have a desire to play any of these AI generated games. I'm curious what other people here think (even if we're all little bias here due to our technical curiosity - very curious what you think)? like, I generally feel that because the technical execution for something like is diminishing to zero, the half of me that likes to play and look out for new games doesn't really see why this is special or interesting? I too have ideas and can put a couple hundred dollars into opus 5.5 and get it to make an entire game. once this all becomes normalized and everything from games, to books, to movies, tv shows, etc become something that can just be generated at a good enough quality that I wouldn't know the difference between a person and machine, I guess what is the point of any of this? I feel like knowing that a machine made this instantly reminds me that literally nothing about this matters. a lot of the joy behind getting into something like a game or book was to be able to celebrate someone’s hard work and to be apart of a community and or talk to like minded people about someone’s works.
and I want to be clear, none of this is criticism towards the demo here - the demo is cool. I'm just also curious what people think the 2nd/3rd/4th order effects will be when making anything becomes so normal, that it's just another part of your day-to-day? I guess, I'm kind of searching for an answer to the question of why should I really care about this if it's all a zero sum game and a race to the bottom?
[1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w
[3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...
I invite you to examine my clean-room implementation of Animal Crossing, coming out next week. Infinite expanse and multiplayer.
I'm not sure what you mean by "new games" - but substantial changes to existing games are extremely easy.
Also - the animals will be LLMs - so when you talk shit about them they'll remember and get revenge.
So of course HN deleted it.
(It was a language game about forgetting a language instead of learning a language.)
https://telegra.ph/The-last-message-01-13
https://x.com/PeterMolydeux
>Had to make the difficult decision today to lay off the entire studio after play testers said our game was ‘too good’. Will start again with a new team to help avoid creating a mainstream game.
>Imagine a game where the main character forgets important information and abilities if you take too long a break from playing.
>Imagine if refunding a game was part of the game. The only way to see the true ending is to send it and receive a video link within your receipt.
>Imagine a game where your character has the ability to switch between different patches of the game in real-time.
>Announcement. My new game will be delayed by 9 months to add polish. This new groundbreaking feature allows the player to polish absolutely anything in a world that is continuously gathering dirt in real-time.
>Excited about creating a remake of one of my games, I just need to finish creating the original first
>I’m about to redefine a new genre of game that has yet to defined.
>Imagine a Metroidvania style game where you lose all emotions and have to slowly gain them all back again, using each one to discover new depths to your inner soul
>My new game is so advanced that it will recognize if you are trying to speed run and make the game longer as a consequence
>Imagine a game where you can access the credits at any time and rearrange it to change your experience. For example putting programmers under art turns the environment into cubes which may be useful for accessing new areas
>Imagine a game that uses music to confuse you. Playing uplifting music during sad moments or scary music during funny moments etc
Design Sense: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/design-...
Will Wright: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Simulator Effect: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Mental Model Compiler: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Goldilocks Complexity: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Player as Storyteller: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Failure as Entertainment: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Interface to Agency: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Stage Magic: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Chris Trottier: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Tuned Emergence: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Design by Accretion: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Ian Bogost: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Procedural Rhetoric: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Scott McCloud: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Masking: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Gutter Closure: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Stone Librande: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
One-Page Designs: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Bret Victor: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Explorable Explanations: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Chaim Gingold: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Reverse Diagrams: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
Time to Penis (TTP): https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/design-...
I’m poking fun at copyright abuse that is part of LLMs - perhaps that decompiled source was already in the training set, who knows at this point.
> perhaps that decompiled source was already in the training set
Nope, it works for all games. Unless you think all game code has been secretly stolen.