Retro gaming is being overrun with AI

The retro gaming community is currently facing a surge in AI-powered decompositions, recompositions, and ports, leading to chaos. These unexpected projects have become viral in recent months, thanks to new AI tools that have allowed hobbyists to take apart games and rebuild them for new platforms. However, this rapid pace of AI-driven development has also raised concerns among preservationists.

Decompositions and recompositions are forms of reverse engineering that involve breaking down a game into its building blocks and rebuilding it for use on different hardware. While manual decompilation is a slow and painstaking process, AI coding tools have significantly reduced the timeline, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of ports.

Chris Sotraidis, an AI consultant who works on game ports as a hobby, experienced this firsthand when he created a mobile port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time using an existing community-built decompilation within just a few weeks.

The speed offered by AI tools has drawn many people to experiment with these projects, either for fun, the technical challenge, or preservation purposes. However, this has also caused issues within the preservationist community. One key reason for decompilation projects is to gain a deeper understanding of how games work, but this knowledge is lost when AI handles the work. Consequently, many ports lack the proper programming decisions or context, making it difficult to restore games faithfully.

The rapid pace of AI-driven decompositions has overwhelmed the DIY scene, and a community-focused website dedicated to tracking these projects and providing resources recently shut down due to AI's impact. This shutdown highlights the growing problem of people using AI to rush through the process while building on others' work, rather than making meaningful contributions to existing projects.

The community-centric nature of the decomp scene has been broken, with some users taking existing decompilation projects and "finishing" them with AI or racing to port decompositions they didn't contribute to in the first place.

While AI has created a surge of interest and allowed non-programmers to experiment with game preservation, it also poses a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has brought decomp and recomposition into mainstream conversation, enabling a broader audience to explore these concepts. On the other hand, the lack of attention to detail and improper credit given to original creators runs counter to the aims of most preservationists.

As AI tools continue to evolve, the divide between those who support their use in game development and those who are disillusioned by their prevalence is likely to persist.