AI reverse-engineered a 1989 war game in a week, and the trend line is brutal
What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI
A developer gave Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next the job of reverse engineering and porting War of the Lance (1989) to modern browsers. It took about a week, with less than four hours of dedicated human attention, and produced a faithful Three.js reproduction. He then started modernising it into a Total War meets Heroes of Might and Magic experience. The broader point: the transformer commoditises deep knowledge work that once took decades to learn, with devastating long-term effects on the knowledge economy.
The transformer and the associated destruction of intellectual property protections end this, commoditising knowledge that took decades to learn in seconds, turning the previous knowledge sharing economy on the internet against its contributors and creators.
- ridiculous_leke
Halo running in WASM at 120 FPS over a browser
- keeda
Cross posting from another thread: 17 games fully or partially reversed and ported to the web by one very capable dude in a few weeks with frontier and open weight models. He also did this thing where he “spliced” different game concepts and turned WoW into an FPS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652089
In case you mistake him for an “AI booster”, you should see this guy’s other posts, he is extremely critical of the AI frontier labs and Tech Bros and this whole AI bubble.
But he is also a very experienced game developer, and under his control the latest models have pulled off these crazy feats. What TFA is the analysis of a domain expert and what it means for the industry.