Halo, GTA Vice City, The Simpsons: AI-decompiled game ports are running in the browser

Hundreds of games and emulators, reconstructed using AI-assisted decompilation, have appeared in the space of a few weeks. Kotaku has tested web ports of classics that work almost perfectly.

Kotaku notes the appearance, within two weeks, of hundreds of games and emulators rebuilt thanks to IA-assisted decompilation. The site attributes this phenomenon to the progress of Claude Opus 5.5 in this exercise: reconstruct the source code of a game, a work that required months from developers, can now be entrusted to a model that runs all night.

Surprisingly faithful web ports

The journalist tried playable versions in a browser tab of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Combat Evolved, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Skate 3 and The Simpsons: Hit and Run. Some of them seemed almost blameless: Hit and Run reached 240 images per second, and one of the four versions of Halo tested even offered functional online servers. These are mostly PS2 and PS3 titles, whose memory requirements (512 MB for PS3) are far below what a modern browser consumes.

For publishers such as Take-Two or Microsoft, the classic legal parade, the challenge, may not be enough: if these ports are recreated as quickly as they disappear, the protection of intellectual property turns into the game of chat and mouse, on a scale that Kotaku compares with the arrival of hacked DVDs.