There’s been a huge modding boom lately where the newest GPT 6 family and Claude models from OpenAI and Anthropic respectively have been utilised in porting games inside other games.
For example, there’s now literally three games in the original Modern Warfare 2: a ported version of the Skate game, Minecraft and Modern Warfare 2 itself. Don’t want to shoot the enemy in Multiplayer? No problem, just bust out a skateboard and have Captain Price do some half pipes and cool stunts while the enemy stops and just stares at what you’re doing. Or have Simon “Ghost” Riley show off some moves before trick-shotting you in the head.
Go into Minecraft mode, spawn into an actual Minecraft world full with biomes, and shotgun down a tree. Go hunting for diamonds, snipe a Ender Dragon and chug a beer for a hard earned victory. Or have a friend join and survive the night while shooting Creepers. (Check this repo out if you want more info.)
People on X (Twitter) scream “it’s all AI slop!”, but when you ask someone like me who uses Claude to assist with their programming, I wouldn’t say it falls into the “AI slop” by pure definition. Yes, the code might have (mostly) been written by an AI agent, but if it is functional and it works, then it’s better than nothing. After all, you can’t make these mods a commercial project so who really cares if you’re having fun making or playing the mods?
For the record, “AI slop” to me is AI-generated code that is a complete mess to the extent that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out in 10 minutes. Thankfully, most of the newer models try to assist in readability as they sprinkle in helpful comments to aid humans reading the code, but sometimes the “slop factor” needs to avoided with careful prompt engineering.
What about the actual mods written by a real human?
Game mods written by a real human will still exist. There’ll be human-created game mods that use AI to assist in disassembly tasks, while the actual integration was done by hand. AI agents won’t replace human mods. If anything, it will help assist the mod creators create better mods, taking their ideas to the next level.
AI-assisted programming is a valid thing, and sometimes you need assistance to do reverse engineering that would take 3 months, when Astra or Fable could spearhead it and have it done within a week.
That means you could spend the rest of the 2 months, 3 weeks actually working on integrating your mod rather than having to spend time guessing chasing functions from the disassembly and back-tracking through 30k lines of code.
TL;DR
Using an AI model to decompile a game and create mods can create some really interesting and fun scenarios. What if Mario 64 was inside Elden Ring? – This. What happens if we put Wii Sports into Call of Duty: World at War Zombies? That. What happens if you merge Escape From Tarkov with Skyrim? We’ve got that too.
Nothing would be more satisfying than throwing a bowling ball and mowing down Zombies for a strike. Or using a baseball bat and that Zombie’s head earns you a home run.
Important note is that the mods themselves sit on top of game rewrites or ports like IW4L, libsm64 and me3, and you need to supply the game data yourself. The downloads do not come with any copyrighted game data.
Final Thoughts
Personally, I’m liking the crazy mashups that happen when you let someone loose with GPT and Claude and ask “what happens if we put game A and game B together?”.
I do like the fact that AI is helping classic games run correctly with improved quality of life features and adjustments on newer hardware thanks to AI-assisted de-compilation projects. It’s fun to see a older Call of Duty get other games ported into it. Or Halo: Combat Evolved running inside a Web Browser on a PC, running on a Playstation 4, or even running on a New Nintendo 3DS XL. That to me, is cool.
Maybe I’ll consider asking Claude to work with me on porting a certain anime waifu game to a better game engine… When I have enough free time before I kick the bucket.