by Doc – Owner, Founder, If We Ever Decomp Smash Ultimate That Could Be Pretty Freaky For Competitive Amiibo, And I Bet It’ll Happen Soon
Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow.
Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Wii.
Super Mario 64.
Majora’s Mask.
Super Mario Galaxy.
Sonic Advance 2.
Smash 64 and Melee.
And so, so many more.
Look, I am very sympathetic to anti-AI sentiments, to the point where I refuse to use AI-generated writing on Amiibo Doctor and have it included in our “About Us” statement. AI has no place in replacing that most sacred of human expressions: writing with a voice.
However, you’ve gotta admit that it has democratized and accelerated programming access for the masses, and that’s a way cool thing. It seems like all of a sudden so many games are being decompiled/recompiled to play natively on a PC, making them extremely moddable. Before AI’s introduction into the retro gaming space, if you wanted a modified version of an older non-PC game you had to find a ROM hack, which usually involved the ROM hacker learning the ins and outs of a game engine and its obscure programming language, and the quirks of the console itself. It was a lot of work for one person to do, so most ROM hacking for a series centralized around a few games that were lucky enough to have some dedicated tools to their modding. Pokemon, for example, has most of its ROM hacks on the Pokemon Emerald engine as that’s where the tools are. Ditto for Super Mario 64 (you’ll notice there’s not a lot of Super Mario Sunshine ROM hacks compared to the hundreds for Mario 64).
But Wait, There’s More!
There’s always been a ton of programming hurdles to overcome for even a simple ROM hack. Now you don’t have to hack the ROM, you can just remake it on your PC and play it like it’s a native app. I’ve already written about this a few months ago but I still cannot stress enough just how absolutely massive this is to me. The Pokemon RBY mods are the craziest to me, especially the voxel mod.
What this basically did is it took the machine instructions for RBY, translated them to modern computing languages, and by doing so made them accessible to programmers who already know the languages. That means that you can run RBY, natively, on your PC and it’s extremely easy to mod. Couple that with the ability to vibe code something and voila! You have mods to your favorite games easily accessible. This is so flexible that you can run it on an Android phone, Windows PC, or just about anything else that can run an .exe. Or you can be like jayboymodz and have it on your handheld PC, outputting to a CRT (good Youtube channel, by the way):
But Wait, There’s… Still More!
This isn’t really a de/recompilation, but apparently there’s a trend in modding games where the player runs both of the games simultaneously and has a result like this:
Youtuber chasm (linked above) created a passthrough mod that basically reads the data from Minecraft and Skyrim instances running simultaneously, letting him “play” both games at the same time. The collision data from Skyrim is prioritzed, but if he places a block it overwrites it. The damage from his Minecraft swings have properties in Skyrim. You get the idea.
At a basic level I understand what he’s doing, but I imagine it requires a lot of “what happens if” thinking ahead of time, so this is likely something to also be spurred on by vibe coding that still needs oversight from human programmers. AI, in my experience, isn’t very good at imagining scenarios it hasn’t seen before.
Look, I don’t know quite what this’ll look like going forward for the video game industry. To tell you the truth I think we’re entering an environment where all commercially-available software will be hackable and crackable by just about anybody thanks to AI, and I can’t say I feel bad for the companies making this. As Sony said, customers don’t actually own the games they pay for, right? Well, neither do the companies that make them soon enough. I think that’s a good thing. And of course there’s the possibility that cloud-based gaming could make a comeback as a way to prevent fans from doing this to future games (though cloud-based gaming sucks).
There’ll always be a place for a physically separate video game console, I feel. Nintendo will be fine. People like the form factor of video game consoles and the ease of use, and not everyone wants to hack everything that comes out right away. But PC gaming had better beware!
