Halo with online servers, GTA: Vice City and Simpsons at 240 fps in your browser: the craze of AI 'vibe-coded' game ports, explained
Hundreds of versions of classic games recreated with artificial intelligence have appeared in a matter of weeks, and publishers have a problem on their hands.
Foto: Reprodução via KotakuWhat is going on? In recent weeks, the internet has been flooded with hundreds of versions of famous games that run straight in the browser, with no console or install. The list includes Halo: Combat Evolved, GTA: Vice City, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Skate 3 and The Simpsons: Hit and Run. An Oct. 8 post from the Radiant Optimizer account on X helped spread the trend. Kotaku tried some of them: one of the four Halo ports it tested even had working online servers with low ping, and Simpsons could target 240 frames per second.
How is this possible? It's so-called 'vibe coding', where programming is largely done by AI from prompts. According to Kotaku, models such as Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 have become very good at decompiling games, meaning rebuilding the source code from the finished program. A task that used to take programmers months of manual work can now run overnight. Not everything is perfect: in the site's test, a PS3 game, from a console with about 512 MB of RAM, was using around 1,200 MB in the browser.
What about the legal side? The games still belong to companies such as Take-Two and Microsoft, which can send takedown notices. The problem, Kotaku notes, is that nothing stops new ports from popping up in their place, in a game of whack-a-mole comparable to DVD piracy. For publishers, the worst part is precisely that some of these ports run perfectly, and legal departments are likely to be working overtime from here on.
