Gaming outlet Kotaku reported on October 9 that, over the past two to three weeks, hundreds of emulators and game ports built through AI “vibe coding” and decompilation have appeared online, many of them playable directly in a browser. The author, Lewis Parker, tried them one by one and described several as “near-perfect.”
The titles he named include Call of Duty: Black Ops (with its Zombies mode), Halo: Combat Evolved, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Skate 3 and The Simpsons: Hit & Run. For Halo: Combat Evolved he tried four different browser versions, and one of them already runs a multiplayer server; he connected to it and found latency very low. The Simpsons port reportedly targets a frame rate of 240fps.
The toolchain is now a single model
The article attributes the wave of ports to Claude Opus 5.5, which it describes as “extremely good at decompiling.”
Decompiling means turning a compiled binary back into source code that a person can read, modify and recompile. With source in hand, developers can rebuild a game for other platforms, including WebAssembly and the browser.
This used to take sheer manpower. The best-known community example is the Super Mario 64 decompilation project, in which a group of enthusiasts worked from assembly and restored the game one function at a time, taking a considerable amount of time before declaring it complete in 2019. Kotaku's author describes the situation today as handing a game to Opus 5.5, leaving it running overnight, and getting back code you can keep working on.
Hardware is no longer the bottleneck either. Most of the ported games date from the PS2 and PS3 era, and the article offers a comparison: the PS3 has roughly 512MB of memory, while the author's browser alone was using about 1,200MB as he wrote the piece.
What the lawyers are holding
The rights holders for most of these games are still running the corresponding franchises. Grand Theft Auto belongs to Take-Two, while Halo and Call of Duty are now both under Microsoft. Kotaku's author imagines lawyers at both companies sending cease-and-desist letters to demand takedowns, then immediately asks what would stop someone from simply building a new version straight away, a situation he calls “IP protection whack-a-mole.”
Game companies do have precedent in dealing with emulators. In March 2024, Nintendo sued the developers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, and the team settled by paying $2.4 million and ceasing development. That case had a clearly identifiable development team and sponsorship income that could be traced.
The authors of this latest batch of ports are scattered, and according to Kotaku each project takes only a night to produce. Even if rights holders went after them one by one, the cost structure of enforcement would differ from the one used against a single fixed team back then.
One more line remains untouched for now: what responsibility the model provider bears. Anthropic's usage policy prohibits uses that infringe intellectual property, yet decompilation itself has legitimate room in many jurisdictions, for example for interoperability purposes. And within a conversation, it is hard for a model to judge whether the user's copy of a game was lawfully obtained. As of publication, Anthropic, Take-Two and Microsoft had not publicly responded to these ports.
What remains unclear
The Kotaku piece is a hands-on report. It did not verify one by one whether each port was generated entirely by AI, nor how much manual patching the authors did after the AI's output. “Decompiled overnight” is the author's own summary; how long a particular game took, or how many tokens it used, is not disclosed in the article.
For players and the communities that preserve old games, this reopens an old question: where is the line between game preservation and infringement? Many PS2 and PS3 games went out of sale long ago, and the original consoles have been out of production for years, so players who want to replay them legitimately often have little choice but to hunt down used physical discs. As the barrier to the tools falls, both the appeal of ports for preservation and the copyright risk they carry will grow.
Parker's closing judgment is that publishers' legal teams will be working overtime “for the foreseeable future.”
Sources: Kotaku, Anthropic usage policy, CocoLoop; verified: the list of ported titles, the PS3 and browser memory figures, and the Yuzu settlement amount.