AI decompilation wave reshapes game preservation and industry risks
Simon Willison highlights a recent wave of AI-powered decompilation of existing games, enabling mashups and preservation projects that run old games on new hardware, often via WebAssembly. The piece notes both benefits for preservation and risks, including potential software theft and forced open-sourcing of paid products.
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Simon Willison
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary. Indie game developer Popcar talks about the recent wave of AI-powered decompilation of existing games, enabling weird mashups between existing games, and producing a boom in game preservation projects to get old games working on new hardware (often in a browser using WebAssembly). I like how this piece captures both the positives and the negatives of this new development: Most people already realized the scary part by now. If AI can decompile games and software, then the entire tech industry is about to explode. Anybody can decompile other software and use it any way they'd like, and nobody can stop them. Companies can steal from competitors. Your paid game or app can be open-sourced against your will. This isn't exclusive to old video games, we can apply this to any software. [...] This is also a big win for preservation. Old games can be ported, modified, enhanced, and made much more easily accessible than before. [...[ Wit