LLMs Are Rewriting Game Modding: Decompiled Mashups, Emulators and a Collapsing Barrier to Entry

Two videos from SomeOrdinaryGamers, posted a week apart in autumn 2026, document the same shift from two directions. In the first, Mutahar plays a build of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that also runs Skate 3 and a Minecraft world, stitched together by hobbyists with heavy help from large language models (SomeOrdinaryGamers, 2026a). In the second, PlayStation 5 exclusives run on a PC emulator that barely booted them a few months earlier (SomeOrdinaryGamers, 2026b).

The common thread is reverse engineering. Taking a compiled game apart and rebuilding it used to require rare specialists and years of volunteer work. Coding models connected to reverse-engineering tools have compressed some of that work into days. This post follows each video as a chapter, with the video embedded at the top of each; the timestamps jump to the matching moment in that chapter’s video. It ends with what the shift means for quality, security and the law.

Chapter 1: Video games will never be the same again

Mashups that should not exist

The video opens on things that look like jokes: skateboarding inside Modern Warfare 2 (watch from 0:00), a Skyrim tavern blown apart with Minecraft TNT, and an Elden Ring boss fought with Minecraft weapons (watch from 1:02). The question Mutahar asks is the right one: how did this become possible so quickly?

Ghidra, MCP and a day of decompiling

The answer offered is that coding models have become good enough to help decompile entire games (watch from 2:02). To test it, Mutahar loaded the binary of an Xbox game into Ghidra, the reverse-engineering framework the US National Security Agency released as open source in 2019 (National Security Agency, 2019), and connected it to a model through an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol introduced by Anthropic in 2024, is a standard way to let a model operate external tools (Anthropic, 2024). Within a day or two, the video says, the project was rendering the game’s graphics and weapons (watch from 3:02).

The striking part is not any single trick. It is the workflow: a disassembler with a model attached, iterating on a binary that no human on the project fully understands.

Old games in a browser tab

The results already reach players. The video shows the original Xbox version of Halo running in a web browser with keyboard and mouse support at around 60 frames per second (watch from 4:02), and a reimplementation that hosts large multiplayer matches from a shareable link. Another project runs reverse-engineered builds of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City inside San Andreas, with portals between them (watch from 5:04).

Rewrites, not emulation

The mashup at the top of the video is not emulation. Mutahar walks through IW4L, a rewrite of Modern Warfare 2 in Rust on the Bevy engine and the wgpu graphics library, whose author says it was written almost entirely by a language model (watch from 6:06). Bevy’s entity-component-system design keeps game logic separate from physics and rendering, which is what lets a separate Skate 3 rewrite be bolted onto it (watch from 7:08). A third component generates a Minecraft world underneath (watch from 8:09).

Two details matter. The rewrite asks for the original game files: Mutahar installs Modern Warfare 2 from Steam and supplies original Skate 3 data (watch from 9:09). And the model, the video notes, will even walk a beginner through installing the reverse-engineering tools. The barrier to entry, the video argues, is falling to levels that did not seem possible.

Humans still do the hard joins

It also crashes, often (watch from 12:14). Skating breaks on Minecraft terrain because block edges are not recognised as rails, and bugs require feeding errors back to the model. Mutahar is clear that fusing three engines took human design decisions; it was not a matter of asking an agent to merge the games (watch from 17:18). Other projects push the idea further, including a multiplayer Super Mario 64 with Minecraft mixed in (watch from 18:20).

What changes

The closing argument is about who can do this work. People with the skill to reverse-engineer a game have usually had better-paid things to do, so many projects never happened; models now let enthusiasts will them into existence (watch from 19:20). Mutahar acknowledges that much of it is slop, and credits the same tools for the rapid progress of PlayStation 5 emulation (watch from 20:20). The video also prefers open models that run locally over frontier services that lock users into one ecosystem, while admitting that local models cannot yet do this work (watch from 21:22).

Chapter 2: Everything is about to change

Assistive, not autopilot

The second video starts by dismissing the mashups as short-lived spectacle and taking a position on the community argument over AI in mods, emulators and preservation projects (watch from 1:00). It is a nuanced one: if you cannot read the code a model writes, you probably should not ship it, but experienced developers using a model to save hours, and auditing what it produces, is fine.

PlayStation 5 emulation in months, not years

The centrepiece is PlayStation 5 emulation. Using backed-up copies of the games, Mutahar runs community forks of an experimental PS5 emulator that load Astro Bot with its cut-scenes and some ray-traced effects working, albeit with broken graphics and shader stutter on an RTX 3080 (watch from 2:01). The video stresses the pace: emulation projects used to take years to show results, and a few months earlier these builds struggled to draw a title screen (watch from 4:02; 5:02). Mutahar attributes much of the acceleration to talented programmers working with AI assistance (watch from 6:02).

Two practical points explain the demand. A new PlayStation 5 was listed at $899 on GameStop’s US site, with pre-owned units priced higher than new ones (watch from 8:02). And modern emulators increasingly translate system calls and graphics work rather than simulating every piece of hardware, which lowers the overhead enough for a mid-range PC (watch from 9:04).

Community patches where studios left

The examples Mutahar finds most meaningful are not mashups. Elden Ring’s combat was reportedly ported to Rust and transplanted into Skyrim using Ghidra and a model (watch from 10:05). REDriver2, a human-made decompilation of Driver 2 translated from MIPS assembly to C years ago, is now being extended in AI-assisted forks with features such as a speedometer and longer draw distance (watch from 12:06). A fork of the shadPS4 emulator runs DriveClub, a PlayStation 4 game whose studio has closed, at up to 120 frames per second (watch from 13:07). A single-screen version of Majora’s Mask 3D was built with a model identifying the game’s rendered elements at the assembly level, which its author says would otherwise have been beyond them (watch from 15:08).

AI in the commit history

The debate is no longer hypothetical. Mutahar points to Ship of Harkinian, a celebrated PC port of Ocarina of Time, which some fans held up as entirely human-written; its recent history includes a commit co-authored by an AI model and merged into the main branch (watch from 17:09). For many projects, the question has moved from whether AI is used to how its contributions are reviewed.

The legal and security edge

The same capability cuts the other way. Mutahar runs these builds on an isolated machine, because unaudited AI-written code can carry serious vulnerabilities and public repositories can be used to slip malicious changes in (watch from 14:07). The video also describes projects built from leaked source code that were taken down (watch from 16:08), and efforts to decompile and recreate commercial creative software such as Adobe’s applications (watch from 19:10). Mutahar expects legal pressure to follow, and possibly stronger guardrails in the models themselves (watch from 27:13).

What it adds up to

Ilya Sutskever described code models in 2021 as giving AI the computer as an actuator, discussed in Reading Ilya Sutskever’s 2021 LLM Forecast in 2026. These videos show what happens when the computer being actuated is a disassembler. Four conclusions follow.

• The barrier really has collapsed. Work that once needed rare specialists can now be started by an enthusiast with a reverse-engineering tool, a model and patience. Mutahar’s more interesting prediction is not more mashups but the transplanting of good mechanics, such as a game’s movement system, from one game into another (watch from 24:12).

• Quality still depends on people who read the code. Every impressive build in these videos also crashes, and the projects that matter most pair model output with human review.

• Security is part of the cost. Treat AI-built mods, decompilations and emulator forks as untrusted software: run them isolated, prefer projects with visible review, and do not install builds from unknown sources.

• The law has not changed. Using your own game files is one thing; distributing copyrighted assets, leaked source code or decompiled commercial software is another, and the rules differ by country. A faster tool does not make a project legal, and the legal response Mutahar anticipates is likely to shape which of these projects survive.

References

Anthropic. (2024, November 25). Introducing the Model Context Protocol. https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol

National Security Agency. (2019). Ghidra [Computer software]. GitHub. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

SomeOrdinaryGamers. (2026a, September 30). Video games will never be the same again… [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBIqutAA6nU

SomeOrdinaryGamers. (2026b, October 6). Everything is about to change… [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGdA7hhwk4o