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 skateboarding in Call of Duty? Or playing the original Halo right in your web browser, complete with multiplayer?
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 The Legend of Zelda 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.