Comment by neovive

I've worked on private servers for a few games that were shut down, starting long before LLMs were invented. The answer in these cases is that human culture has value to most people. Not only are the gameplay experiences themselves valuable to preserve for new and old players alike, but they also embody periods of time that were in some ways better. As a child, a large amount of my social experiences played out through MMO-type games, which future generations probably won't have, given how worldwide social media controls are effectively requiring people to have an online speech license. Even if such an experience could never legally be rolled out on a large scale again, it's still probably worth holding onto what you can, for smaller communities.

Decomps take the preservation of human culture a step further. In my projects, it has become clear that Windows is no longer a reliable platform, and x86 has a sketchy future, but decompilations can help keep a game alive by moving it somewhere else for the sake of accessibility. They also enable further understanding (whether by AI or people) of the game, along with fixing it and expanding upon it.

Vibing a new experience is valuable, but it's not a substitute for what's already been made.

Imagine there is a game you used to enjoy some time ago, but its servers got shut down, updates changed it in a way you don't like or [insert another N reasons why its not playable anymore]. You don't want a new game, you want to play that exact game.

Now you can just obtain an old build and resurrect it for your own good.

Cloning existing games can be done with little to no work.

Building something new is challenging, with or without AI its orders of magnitude slower than copying.

Building something new is also risky. Copying something with proven vitality is less so.

Given this almost tautologically you should expect way more clones than novel things.

As a game designer the answer is very obvious: That's hard work!

As a heavy LLM user there is another obvious answer: The LLM is very good at copying.

I suppose those are two sides of the same coin. All the hard decisions and all the creativity is already done.

Those aren't the only options though. I've long told people that want to get into game dev that the best thing to do is mod their favorite games. I'm hopeful that the technical ease to do that now leads to a lot of human creativity being expressed.

I have not explored this but If I wanted Claude Code to make a spiritual successor to Punch Out I would first have it clone Punch Out to see if it was capable of doing this, then if it worked I'd start changing the assets and mechanics one idea at a time until I had something with more novelty behind it.

besides what the others replied, cloning can be done by people with very little skill in the area and in general it's always way easier to work from a proven design (existing game) than to come up with one from scratch.

Bait

Nostalgia