Decompiling used to be a laborious, months-long job for people with serious technical knowledge. The report describes Claude now producing a game's source code from its compiled version overnight, and combining two games on request. Human involvement has not vanished: the best mashups reportedly still need significant tweaking. But the barrier has collapsed from months of work to, in some cases, an evening.

The reporter tested how low the bar now sits. With no coding background, they asked Claude to build a mashup of an obscure N64 game and a popular one in a browser; four minutes later they had a playable, if rubbish, game, plus instructions for pulling visual assets from the source games and hosting it locally to sidestep copyright issues.

People who do know what they are doing have gone further. The report describes recent games such as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom running in web browsers, open-source launcher code on GitHub drawing on emulated codebases to offer vast free retro libraries, and, most consequentially, a huge jump in PlayStation 5 emulation, with almost any PS5 game now reportedly runnable on a PC for free. Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 emulation has also become markedly easier via AI-assisted launchers and mod hubs.

Much of this is, as the report puts it, extremely illegal, and it lands squarely on publishers who would rather their game code stayed out of public hands. Some defenders frame PS5 emulation as a response to Sony's retreat from physical games. The piece ends on an open question: AI has largely hit individual creators until now, so will corporations being affected force a reckoning?