Browser versions of Halo, GTA: Vice City and Black Ops appeared within hours: Claude Opus 5.5 decompiles games overnight, Kotaku reports
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
SI has learned to take a game apart overnight and move it into a browser, and the dispute now is how to protect copyright when a copy can be made in hours.
According to Kotaku, in the past couple of weeks hundreds of browser ports and emulators have appeared, made through "vibe coding" after decompiling games with Claude Opus 5.5, which the author says is "extremely good" at decompiling; what teams used to spend months on, an agent can now do overnight. The author writes that ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: CE, GTA: Vice City, Skate 3 and The Simpsons: Hit and Run "run very well" — The Simpsons: Hit and Run ran at 240 frames per second, and one of four Halo: CE ports had working online servers with low ping. Kotaku describes the situation as a race over intellectual-property protection in which rights holders have little chance: their lawyers can send takedown demands, but new ports are easy to make again.
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