Last night, I learned that somebody used the Anthropic suite of tools to port Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 64 to Windows PC. According to the news articles I read, this guy basically plugged in a ROM file, told Claude to get to work, and about a month of solid programming later, it finished. After having braced myself for the earthquakes from all of the early Nintendo developers rolling over in their graves at playing Nintendo natively on a PC, I tested it myself, and I can say that it is about a 99% perfect solution. It feels wrong playing with an Xbox controller, but given the coolness of this situation, I can be okay with that.
I know that porting Nintendo 64 and other retro games to PC is something that’s been going on for a few years now, even before AI hit the big time, but this to me feels like a bit of a milestone. For my entire life, if you wanted a ROM hack, a mod of a retro game, a port, or any other sort of work with an old game, you had to deal with all the messiness that old games consisted of. Some of them were in assembly, some of them used weird translators — there was just a lot of nonsense to go around back in the day. But now that’s not an obstacle. Programming ability and knowledge has been so democratized and accelerated that even I can produce a video game with enough patience, tokens, and prompting, and I’m doing that.
Yeah, I know there are controversies surrounding AI, and those problems will not be cleared up until after the AI bubble pops in the markets and the technology improves over a few decades. That’s a topic for a different post.
In the meantime, let’s flesh out what something like this means. To me, this means video game mods will now gradually get easier and easier, until they’re not an issue at all. We already have AI producing flat graphics and 3D models in Blender, and potentially programming them as well. It’s not hard to imagine a day where somebody with an expensive enough Claude subscription could plug several agents into, say, the Unity engine, Blender, and Photoshop, then plug in a file dump of a Switch game and several hours later get a ROM hack that would otherwise have taken years previously. I can imagine a day where, if I want to mod Pokémon Scarlet so that all the Pokémon from the Dex can spawn, I can plug it into Claude, have Claude identify how the spawns occur, and modify it accordingly. Eventually I may even be able to plug in model files from other games like Legends Z-A and have Claude patch in that character and some sort of story event. Don’t get me wrong – I have all the respect in the world for the extremely skilled people who do this kind of work by hand to produce content for the Pokémon franchise. Human-produced assets are always better than AI-generated ones, because it’s only via human creativity that we can connect with each other through art. I have no desire to play a vibe-coded game that some guy on the internet would proclaim as better than existing Pokémon games because it takes all the existing ones and mashes them through an AI.
However, there are many old games that would benefit heavily from adding old features, patching old bugs, and otherwise bringing in expansions that should have been included anyway. That’s what I’m excited about for this.
Amiibo Doctor 