TechSpot reports that Dario, a lead contributor to a Banjo-Kazooie PC port, published a lengthy critique of the growing use of LLMs to decompile, recompile and port retro games, arguing the practice produces verbose, hard-to-audit code from developers with little knowledge of the games and is displacing the human reverse-engineering work that makes the ports possible. He also disputes that AI saves time. TechSpot notes that the HarbourMasters team behind well-known ports of Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64 and the Zelda games was revealed to have used LLMs for years, and that AI-assisted recompilations of titles such as Banjo Tooie and Beetle Adventure Racing have angered developers whose work was reused without their knowledge.
Banjo-Kazooie port developer blasts AI vibe coding as retro gaming fills with low-quality ports
TechSpot reports that Dario, a lead contributor to a Banjo-Kazooie PC port, published a lengthy critique of the growing use of LLMs to decompile, recompile and port retro games, arguing the practice produces verbose, hard-to-audit code from developers with little knowledge of the games and is displacing the human reverse-engineering work that makes the ports possible. He also disputes that AI saves time. TechSpot notes that the HarbourMasters team behind well-known ports of Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64 and the Zelda games was revealed to have used LLMs for years, and that AI-assisted recompilations of titles such as Banjo Tooie and Beetle Adventure Racing have angered developers whose work was reused without their knowledge.
Source: Techspot