> 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.
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.
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0x000xca0xfe
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...
ticulatedspline
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.
georgeecollins
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.
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zug_zug
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
AdeptusAquinas
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.
carterschonwald
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.
keeda
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.
> 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.
Halo running in WASM at 120 FPS over a browser
https://x.com/mitchellhynes/status/2104658015605379094
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.