AI reverse-engineered a 1989 war game in a week, and the trend line is brutal
What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI
A developer gave Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next the job of reverse engineering and porting War of the Lance (1989) to modern browsers. It took about a week, with less than four hours of dedicated human attention, and produced a faithful Three.js reproduction. He then started modernising it into a Total War meets Heroes of Might and Magic experience. The broader point: the transformer commoditises deep knowledge work that once took decades to learn, with devastating long-term effects on the knowledge economy.
The transformer and the associated destruction of intellectual property protections end this, commoditising knowledge that took decades to learn in seconds, turning the previous knowledge sharing economy on the internet against its contributors and creators.
- brookst
Tangentially, I have a very nice laser cutter with terrible software (xtool p3). Their electron app is a nightmare of poor usability and unwanted “value adds”, while basic stuff like defining order or paths to cut is somewhere between opaque and broken. And the process of exporting DXF, importing to their software, positioning, setting per-path power and speed… such a PITA.
It took claude an hour or two to reverse the gcode dialect and camera controls. Now I just tell it what to cut, load the material, and claude sorts out where to place the work, power, speed, variations for corners and stuff, and cuts. If there’s difficulty I pop the work on a scanner and claude diagnoses and adjusts.
It is going to be very hard to control anything that’s in consumer hands, whether for good or bad reasons.
- CoolestBeans
> 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 […]
- Kuyawa
I ported Prince of Persia to Swift for MacOS [1] over the weekend using DeepSeek Harness, spent three hours in total, $3 in tokens, and got a playable and enjoyable game bringing back good ol' memories
It is a faithful port of Jordan Mechner's 1989 original game and the guiding idea was just one sentence: port the game exactly, rewrite the engine completely
I didn't write a single line of code or test, not even the readme. I don't know if it delivered swift, assembly or brainfvck as directed but the result is spectacular and I would never had done it in ten lifetimes
Coding is solved, human programming is dead, apps will cost close to zero and those who don't see the writing on the wall are hopeless
- Agentlien
I'm a programmer working with porting of video games.
This is absolutely mind-blowing. And at the same time definitely overblown.
This stuff is impressive, but reversing is specifically what these models seems best at and porting new games to weaker hardware is way tougher than this. Not to mention making new games.
- ridiculous_leke
Halo running in WASM at 120 FPS over a browser