For about two weeks my feed has been the same handful of clips. Minecraft running inside Elden Ring. Call of Duty in a browser tab. Skate 3, Modern Warfare 2 and Minecraft stitched into one game. The whole Adobe suite running on Linux. The caption is usually some version of "Claude rewrote it in Rust."
I went and looked at how a few of these actually work. The short version: almost none of them are what the caption says. Some are clever. A couple are just pirated games with a new coat of paint. None of them show an AI taking a finished commercial game apart and rebuilding it from scratch.
Why it's always Minecraft
The Minecraft mashups are not new games. They are two games running at the same time with a piece of glue between them. Minecraft runs with a Fabric mod, the other game runs with its own mod, and a bridge passes state back and forth through hooks and shared memory. You need to own both games, and both have to be open.
Minecraft is always one half because it's written in Java. Java JAR files decompile into something very close to the original source, and Mojang has never worked hard to obscure it. Feed that to an AI and you get readable code quickly.
Skyrim, Elden Ring and GTA V are a different animal. They ship as native x64 machine code with no public source. Modders get in from the outside: a DLL gets loaded through something like SKSE or Mod Engine 2, then finds the functions it cares about by searching for byte signatures and memory offsets. From there it hooks input, camera updates, damage and rendering, and injects its own draw calls into DirectX.
That is also why these projects are fragile. One patch from the developer can move every address the hooks depend on, and the whole thing stops working. It's also why you never see Skyrim inside Elden Ring. Two closed native games give you nothing easy to grab onto.
The three-game mashup
The MW2, Skate 3 and Minecraft project got the loudest claims. People said Claude rewrote all three games in Rust to make a new one. It didn't.
The MW2 part sits on top of an existing Rust recreation of the game's runtime, and it reads MW2 files you already own. The Skate 3 part is another existing Rust project, about two years old, built on human reverse engineering research. It needs your own extracted Xbox 360 executable and data folder. The Minecraft part uses open source Rust crates that already existed and pulls game data straight from Mojang.
So the work here was assembly. Three puzzles' worth of pieces, with the edges trimmed until they fit together. That's real effort and it's kind of fun. It's just not what the tweets described.
Games in a browser tab
The browser versions run on WebAssembly, which lets compiled C, C++ or Rust run inside a browser sandbox. Compile the engine to WebAssembly, add the maps, models, audio and scripts, write a compatibility layer so it talks to the browser, and an old PC game will run in a tab.
The catch is where those assets come from. One project, Vibe Slops 2, was just Black Ops 2 in a browser. It got a DMCA takedown almost immediately, which surprised nobody.
A Black Ops 1 port is murkier. Its GitHub page tells you to supply around 11 GB of your own game data. I didn't, and it ran anyway. The download manifest shows about 931 MB of unpacked Black Ops data landing in the browser on its own. Maybe the instruction is there to keep automated copyright scanners off the repo. Maybe whoever built it didn't fully understand what they'd shipped. Either way, it's handing out the game.
Most of the viral "AI decompiled this" posts fall into one of five buckets:
- A native game recompiled or reimplemented for WebAssembly.
- A new engine that loads data from a copy of the game you own.
- A browser recreation that redistributes copyrighted assets.
- Two real games running side by side with a bridge between them.
- Something new that only resembles the game in the headline.
So can AI decompile a whole game?
Not that I could find. I didn't see a single case of an AI taking a full commercial game and translating it into Rust on its own.
The closest things are the Skate 3 engine, which rests on two years of people doing the reverse engineering by hand, and the Black Ops 1 port, which uses real decompiled engine code compiled to WebAssembly. Whether an AI did that decompilation or it already existed somewhere, I can't say. I didn't dig that far.
There's also an article claiming AI has decompiled 83% of MW2. There's no source anyone can inspect. Until there is, it's a number in a headline and nothing more.
Adobe on Linux, sort of
This is the one I actually wanted to work. Premiere and After Effects on Linux would change my setup. So I tried the recreations.
You can do a lot of what the real apps do. It also crashes more than Premiere, which is saying something if you've ever used Premiere. Most effects, exports and encoding run on the CPU instead of the GPU, and for me that alone rules it out. A 14 minute video taking an hour to render is one of the open issues. You can't drag just the video or just the audio onto the timeline. At the time I checked there were 363 other open issues.
The developers are honest about it. They put the Premiere recreation at 50 to 60% ready for professional work and After Effects at 30 to 50%. Your existing plugins won't load, and your existing project files won't open.
I'm still watching it. The project is about two weeks old and already this far along, and they're closing issues fast. Six months from now it could be stable. It isn't today, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The part that bugs me
I'd be lying if I said none of this was cool. Getting three games from different eras to share a world is a fun trick, and an Adobe clone this far along in two weeks is a little startling.
But it leaves me with a strange, flat feeling. I think of code as something close to art. Everyone writes it a bit differently, and you can often tell who solved a problem by how they solved it. When the work turns into a prompt, that fingerprint fades. Maybe that's just progress. It still feels like something is being lost.
The tech is moving faster than anyone can write about it, so some of this will be out of date by next week. What probably won't change is the gap between what a clip claims and what the repo actually does. Before you share the next "AI rebuilt this game" post, open the GitHub page. It usually tells a much smaller story.