DMCA takedowns for mods and fan overhauls have been happening for years, so it makes sense that decompilation projects, especially the ones assembled quickly and shared widely on social media, are now drawing the same kind of attention. These projects have exploded in number over the past week or so, but many rely heavily on generative AI. Even well‑known efforts like Ship of Harkinian use some form of genAI, despite beginning long before the current wave of vibe‑coded recreations.
The projects that went viral this week were built with far more aggressive AI assistance. One of the first was Fallout: New York. ChrisFirst shared a clip on Twitter showing a browser‑playable recreation of Fallout built with Claude Opus 5.5. It had quests, dialogue trees, VATS, a working Pip‑Boy, and an entire city generated without any texture or sound files. Every building, weapon, face, and ambient noise was "generated by code." The post pulled in millions of views before ChrisFirst shared that he received a cease-and-desist from Bethesda and shut the project down.
The second project that's since been taken down came from Maurice Heumann, who used generative AI to decompile Modern Warfare 2 on PC. He said he...
