Reverse-engineered games: All the news on video game decomps, recomps, VR and web and 3D ports
It’s a wild time for retro gaming. Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined
These are unofficial versions of games, so they may sit in a legal gray area. It seems unlikely that Nintendo, for example, is particularly happy about people finding ways to play
on non-Nintendo hardware. Many of these projects are also made with the assistance of AI, which, for some people, is a non-starter given ethical or environmental concerns surrounding the technology.
Below, you’ll find our coverage of gaming decomps, recomps, and all the other ways gamers are reverse-engineering games to go previously unimaginable places.
How an online community took back the Legend of Zelda
Here’s a video of Half-Life: Alyx running natively on a Vision Pro.
Just think: You could be playing Halo in a web browser right now.
The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have
and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev:
This unofficial Lego Racers remake runs in your browser with split-screen and online multiplayer.
-meets-Lego game is anywhere you want it to be. NavigatorSharp’s fan recreation
on desktop or phone, and you can find builds for Android, Mac, Windows PC and Linux (including the Steam Deck)
How an online community took back the Legend of Zelda
because It’s been in my life for as long as I can remember. Before I had the coordination to play the game myself, I would watch my older brothers play it for hours on end. When I could finally play through it myself, it felt like flying.
I chase that dopamine hit once every year or two by playing through
, which normally requires dusting off my old GameCube and hoping the disk isn’t too scratched to read. But for the last several months, I haven’t been playing
on a Nintendo console at all. Instead, I’ve been playing it on something called
for PC that a few short years ago would have been unimaginable.
TCL’s paperlike OLED phone made me more excited for the iPhone Duo
An AI couldn’t beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat