If your social media algorithms have clocked that you’re into video games, something strange will have happened in the past few weeks. Your feed, like mine, will have been full of clips of streamers playing bizarre mashups of popular video games. Halo, except the main character is Mario.
Skate 2 in Call of Duty maps. A flood of professional-looking fan-coded game mods that are mildly interesting to look at for 30 seconds, but ultimately inconsequential. Would I download a mod that lets me play Wii Bowling inside a zombie shooter?
No, but I am very interested in where they came from. Of course, the answer – or at least, most of the answer – is AI. After a week of researching this (thanks especially to Replay Mode on YouTube for this informative video, which set me down this track) I now understand that these mashup mods are not just AI-generated videos, but AI-assisted coding.
Basically, as of a few weeks ago, Anthropic’s Claude has become extremely good at decompiling video game code. Games are written by humans in readable code and then compiled into binary 1s and 0s that the PC or console running it can read; decompiling is the reversal of that process, revealing a game’s source code, which humans can then edit and mess around with for fun. This used to be an extremely laborious process.
But now it is not, because humans aren’t doing much of it any more. Claude is now able to spit out a game’s source code from its compiled version overnight. Tell it to combine two games and it will help with that, too.
There is not zero human involvement: from what I understand, the best of these mashups have needed significant human tweaking. But this has completely transformed video game modding because you now need drastically less time and computing knowledge to be able to pull off massive projects. It now takes an evening rather than months of work.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
