Stratechery: AI took the games apart, and the risk is the games that come next (2026)

One new item landed in the Gmail queue since yesterday's edition, and it came from Stratechery: the Tuesday Update, published October 6. Lenny's Newsletter published nothing new in the window, so today's digest carries a single source. The subject is the decompilation wave now running through video games, and the Update's own summary line states its frame plainly: "Games are being decompiled, but the real risk to gaming is new games and increased personalization." 1

Game decompilation: the wave, the law, and the people who built the scene

"Game Decompilation, Is This Legal?, A Well-Trodden Path" — Stratechery

Published October 6, 2026, by Ben Thompson. Subscriber-only. The Update is behind the Stratechery Plus paywall, and its page shows the summary line above plus the three topic markers on the official Stratechery post. 2

A decompilation wave broke into the open this past week, and cheap model tokens are what started it. Halo: Combat Evolved, the 2001 original Xbox game, now runs in a web browser; the AI developer Mitchell Hynes released it and hosts it himself, and five hours after launch it had served close to 20,000 games at an average of 94 frames per second. 3 That same work sits behind ports of the game to Windows, Linux and Android and a mode that carries up to 128 players. 4 The price is what changed: Claude Opus 5.5 shipped with cheaper tokens, and people pointed it at finished games, let it reconstruct the source, then mashed the results together — World of Warcraft inside Call of Duty: World at War, Skyrim merged with Escape from Tarkov, Spider-Man swinging through Batman's Arkham City. 5
The legal question splits by activity, and the older half of it was settled in 1992. Reading a program to learn its unprotected functional elements has been fair use in the Ninth Circuit since Sega v. Accolade, where Accolade disassembled Sega's Genesis cartridges in order to build its own compatible games, and Sony v. Connectix carried that protection across to the intermediate copies made while building a non-infringing emulator. 6 Both cases concern what a developer may copy while working. Publishing the reconstructed game is a separate question, and it meets the DMCA's rules on access controls as well as copyright's. 7 Publishers have already shown which half they enforce: ZeniMax, Bethesda's parent, sent a cease-and-desist over the AI-generated Fallout: New York, and its creator pulled the game offline. 3
The path is well trodden, and the people who cleared it are the ones objecting. Unofficial reconstructions have run for years, and the famous ones were built by hand — the Ship of Harkinian port of Ocarina of Time, the N64: Recompiled tool that has been turning Nintendo 64 games into PC builds. 4 The teams behind the human-made Zelda: Recompiled and Banjo: Recompiled projects publish explicit no-AI positions, and one of their developers called the AI-assisted Banjo-Tooie Recompiled a "race to the bottom" that is "just disrespectful" to years of hand research borrowed for the framework underneath it. 8 The concrete complaint is maintenance: ports nobody can fix once they break. The mashups have also stayed off the mod distribution sites so far, partly because Nexus Mods bars uploads built with AI tools over assets the uploader holds no rights to. 5

Access note: the Update itself is subscriber-only, and only its summary line and its three topic markers — Game Decompilation, Is This Legal?, and A Well-Trodden Path — are public. 1 2

Where to start

Open the Update if you work in or around games, or if you are thinking about what cheap, capable coding agents do to software that already exists. Only the summary line is public; the reasoning behind it needs a subscription. 1

The queue refills when either publication posts again.

References

Game decompilation: the wave, the law, and the people who built the scene

"Game Decompilation, Is This Legal?, A Well-Trodden Path" — Stratechery

A decompilation wave broke into the open this past week, and cheap model tokens are what started it. Halo: Combat Evolved, the 2001 original Xbox game, now runs in a web browser; the AI developer Mitchell Hynes released it and hosts it himself, and five hours after launch it had served close to 20,000 games at an average of 94 frames per second. 3 That same work sits behind ports of the game to Windows, Linux and Android and a mode that carries up to 128 players. 4 The price is what changed: Claude Opus 5.5 shipped with cheaper tokens, and people pointed it at finished games, let it reconstruct the source, then mashed the results together — World of Warcraft inside Call of Duty: World at War, Skyrim merged with Escape from Tarkov, Spider-Man swinging through Batman's Arkham City. 5

The legal question splits by activity, and the older half of it was settled in 1992. Reading a program to learn its unprotected functional elements has been fair use in the Ninth Circuit since Sega v. Accolade, where Accolade disassembled Sega's Genesis cartridges in order to build its own compatible games, and Sony v. Connectix carried that protection across to the intermediate copies made while building a non-infringing emulator. 6 Both cases concern what a developer may copy while working. Publishing the reconstructed game is a separate question, and it meets the DMCA's rules on access controls as well as copyright's. 7 Publishers have already shown which half they enforce: ZeniMax, Bethesda's parent, sent a cease-and-desist over the AI-generated Fallout: New York, and its creator pulled the game offline. 3

The path is well trodden, and the people who cleared it are the ones objecting. Unofficial reconstructions have run for years, and the famous ones were built by hand — the Ship of Harkinian port of Ocarina of Time, the N64: Recompiled tool that has been turning Nintendo 64 games into PC builds. 4 The teams behind the human-made Zelda: Recompiled and Banjo: Recompiled projects publish explicit no-AI positions, and one of their developers called the AI-assisted Banjo-Tooie Recompiled a "race to the bottom" that is "just disrespectful" to years of hand research borrowed for the framework underneath it. 8 The concrete complaint is maintenance: ports nobody can fix once they break. The mashups have also stayed off the mod distribution sites so far, partly because Nexus Mods bars uploads built with AI tools over assets the uploader holds no rights to. 5

Access note: the Update itself is subscriber-only, and only its summary line and its three topic markers — Game Decompilation, Is This Legal?, and A Well-Trodden Path — are public. 1 2

Stratechery: AI took the games apart, and the risk is the games that come next

Game decompilation: the wave, the law, and the people who built the scene

"Game Decompilation, Is This Legal?, A Well-Trodden Path" — Stratechery

Where to start

References

Related content

Stratechery: AI took the games apart, and the risk is the games that come next

Game decompilation: the wave, the law, and the people who built the scene

"Game Decompilation, Is This Legal?, A Well-Trodden Path" — Stratechery

Where to start

References

Related content