I do not like Generative AI. The ChatGPTs, Geminis, and Claudes of the world are the worst thing that happened in the tech industry, giving us terrible advertisements, people’s skills atrophying, and several lawsuits because of people taking their own lives through these chatbots. If you’re gonna give any arguments in defense of this kind of stuff, please keep them to yourself. I am not interested. There can be merits for some parts of AI, but the stuff that keeps getting peddled by Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic? Garbage.
What gets me the absolute most lately is not the AI-generated art just plastered everywhere, something I’ve seen as far back as 2025’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo. No, it’s a trend that’s been happening a lot in 2026 and I hate it.
On May 22, 2025, Anthropic introduced Claude Code to the public, starting with Claude 4.0. A subset of their Claude AI bot that’s made for handling programming tasks, it started blowing up throughout the year, with folks praising Claude for letting them do their automated tasks and vibe code their way through projects. (Never mind such things existed before Claude, but I digress.)
Naturally, the video game space would get caught up in Claude fever, as we’d start seeing a few translations come from random folks who never dealt with such projects before. The biggest was back in February, when someone announced an English translation of the Japanese game SEGAGAGA, a Sega Dreamcast game that was a self-parody of Sega around this time. This game was notorious because of the large amount of content that would require translation and proper localization. People rejoiced, as such a project is a huge undertaking and felt like one of the holy grails, one of those that would never come to fruition.
Until it was immediately noticed they used AI to translate it. The results were very clear online, with the typical cheap Japanese-to-English translation that sounds wonky. Hell, I bet there’s at least one (1) “It Can’t Be Helped” in there, a common thing that machine translating Japanese to English does. Funny, I remember the days when folks would actually be shunned for just lazily using Google Translate to translate a Japanese script.
While using AI for translations is quite a shameful thing to do, that wasn’t really the brunt of the problem. With Claude 4.0 introducing Claude Code, naturally this lead to folks flooding the recompilation space. For those who don’t know: Decompilations are taking the previous game code and converting to another more readable format, usually another programming language. These are often used to convert a game to work on another platform, often from a home console to Windows PC, these are often called Recompilations or recomps. There’s a whole lot of these recomps, one example is Unleashed Recompiled, a conversion of Sonic Unleashed for the Xbox 360 to work on a PC, a platform that did not receive the game natively.
People started flooding PC recomps into the space, some doing very little but repacking the existing game and a working emulator with a boring, bland GUI. In several of these cases, they would get announced, featured by schmucks online like “Video Game Esoterica” above with no checking or verification, then the hype would immediately deflate as people would either find Generative AI bots referenced in the readme files. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be that hard to spot, as they would have Claude as a “contributor” on their GitHub page.
One of the biggest things that made the rounds very recently was a post of someone porting Super Mario 64 to the Sony PlayStation. A rather impressive feat. Until you find out the guy just prompted Claude to convert the game’s existing decompiled code about 2000 times to work on a PS1, not really learning anything. This became more apparent as he started porting Super Mario 64 to the 3DO console, which was an incredibly buggier mess; and putting Duke Nukem 3D on the 3DO, also incomplete. It wasn’t until someone else pointed it out that this was their first creations in the video game recompilation space, their previous work on the same YouTube channel was literally indie films and music that got little recognition, nothing at all game related.
This is what bothers me the most about these vibe-coded translations and recomps. Folks like these who are not in it to learn things, to work with a team, or even to be part of a community. It’s about the recognition. The fame. They consider themselves a “savior,” one that solved a problem that others couldn’t solve – not realizing why that is: because it takes time and effort to figure things like these out – all so they can get videos of their half-baked projects “done,” get a bit of social media attention, and probably start a Patreon to keep vibecoding their way to success, or something. They remind me of YouTubers who decide to pivot to anti-woke ragebait content because that gets them the views over normal content. They’re sleazeballs, basically.
There are definitely folks that are well enough known in the gaming spaces, like SilentPatch, that you can trust their stuff is legitimate. But now every time I hear some announcement of a game getting translated to English or being brought to PC (or even both!), I have to inspect to see if it’s a genuine passion project, or someone just vibe coding their way through this. Compared to folks like Silent, who reverse engineer the games to work effectively, a lot of these vibe coded recomps barely work, and since these are often made by people with little experience with programming, all they can do is yell at Claude Code to fix it until they run out of tokens or give up entirely, leaving their vibe coded recomp to be left in the lurch, unfinished. Worst off, these vibe coded efforts actually undermine actual genuine recompilation projects.
YouTube Creator graslu00, a die hard fan of Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark, highlighting not one, but two AI vibe-coded recomps, followed by showing off a proper Goldeneye 007 recompilation currently being done by fans with love and care.
This is something that’s impossible to ignore now. We’ve been seeing clearly AI generated art in countless big budget video games over the past couple years, often times waved away with an “oh that’s just temporary art we meant to replace” excuse that is incredibly flimsy. I figured it would stay strictly into the big budget game space, but it’s plagued even the more interesting, hobby-driven spaces of gaming, ones that I am ostensibly a part of.
I keep hearing about folks who update console cores on the MiSTer FPGA system using nothing but vibe coding. There was the GZDoom fiasco, where lead designer “Graf Zahl” decided to do some vibe coding, causing the rest of the team to fork the source port, creating UZDoom. There’s countless others that I could refer to here, but you get my point. All this AI vibe coding shit is something I just cannot ignore anymore.
Obviously, I’m not someone notable in the recompilation space, I don’t localize things into other languages, hell, I don’t even know how to code very well. I’m just some goober who can decently write words about stuff on the internet. The closest I know about this kind of stuff is editing text files to fix bugs on PC games, but that’s about it.
Still, we really need to start pushing back on this stuff. Because this future of AI vibe coded efforts everywhere will really damage the reputation for these fields, going quantity over quality. It’s like all those AI generated attempts at video games, movies and TV shows that all these hucksters keep saying are “the future:” Shallow husks of what media vaguely looks like, but without the passion, the love, the care of what makes them great.
I normally don’t get mad about something like this. But this whole Generative AI thing has poisoned a hobby that I love. I felt I needed to say something about this, to hopefully convince somebody that AI vibe coding a console game to PC is not the way to go. Hell, at this rate I fully expect some dork to vibe code a PC port of a console game that already had a working PC port. If one of those Goldeneye recomps are any indication, it seriously could happen.
Basically, I hope this AI bubble bursts, that all this generative AI shit goes in the gutter, and that large language models go back to being just a dumb hobby toy rather than The Future of Technology. May Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic suffer a stubbed toe or have someone spit in their food.
Apologies, I am usually not this angry on blog posts. I am often talking about about random games or other silly things that I find interesting, but I felt the need to speak up about this.
If you liked this for… some reason, perhaps support my Patreon, where just $1 will get you early access to my posts before they go live here. They’re usually a bit more lighthearted compared to this, I assure you.
Leave a Reply