Comment by Buttons840
9 hours ago
We're already knocking on the door of just clean-room recreating any game or experience in one shot. In such an environment, who really cares about reverse engineering old games?
I mean, from game company perspective, will they really care about their old games getting reverse engineered when their next big title can be clean-room recreated by anyone with the skill to write a sentence? Maybe creating a game similar to the next big release will be something that the AIs refuse to do next? Interesting times.
As an aspiring game developer myself, I guess reducing the accessibility of old games benefits me (but I don't like it)--and hey, if you can't get that old game to run, maybe we can vibe code for a weekend and make a new game that captures the same feeling.
> who really cares about reverse engineering old games?
Tetris copyright for example is still heavily policed.
I think however if games continue to be killed there should be a legal route towards the community taking ownership in whatever way is necessary.
"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy..
Anyway, 99.99% of "clean room" vibe coded projects are 100% NOT putting in place the proper policies and controls.
It's the wild west out there right now.
I think from a legal perspective modding is technically a violation of the ToS.
But ofcourse the videogame industry has always turned a blind eye to it provided you don't make money from it.