alt Hacker NewsI think the next 10 years or so are going to see a chucklefuck of games reversed thanks to LLMs, which can easily pattern match and operate on contrivedely optimized assembly and output reasonably accurate C/C++ code. I’m one of many right now using Ghidra + LLM workflow. It’s doing the thing it needs to and I’ve helped several communities revive and port their games this way. It is a huge time saver. While I’d personally prefer an actual source code leak, a working reverse job is good enough, even if it’s partial as long as it’s accurate.
I wonder if we’ll get to a situation where a new game is reversed in the first few months by a team effort. Right now it’s mostly solo devs, but a technical team that’s capable without LLMs is unstoppable with them, and given the nature of modding communities, the only thing they are missing is an LLM to grind away at the details of the game that would otherwise take years to find out.
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We are also going to get shovelware without end.
1983 will seem like nothing by comparison.
10 years is far too pessimistic for this being a routine task, I think 2 years max. As you mentioned, you can already do this today by just giving GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8 an IDA/Ghidra tooling (a CLI or MCP, I have a custom CLI for it). You can start with the LLM going from the string anchors and renaming functions/globals, then when you have enough functions, the LLM can start working on typing - IDA has a very powerful typing API for HexRays-decompiled code, you can even type locals and it all persists in a DB.
My custom IDA CLI is just a simple thing on top of IDA Python's integration + ida-domain + some higher-level helpers, and works as a daemon with workers, so a stale/bad request doesn't corrupt an IDA DB (an issue I had when I was using idasql).
A bit offtopic, but: do you have any links to your efforts? I'm curious to see what other people do in this area.
I added several quality-of-life features / UX improvements to a very old game, “Deadlock: Planetary Conquest”[0]
I had no idea how to do any of this. I let GPT-5.5 download Ghidra + MCP connectors, start the project, and do all the work. I gave it my vision and gave it iterative user testing feedback.
Now I have a MUCH more playable UX.
O: https://store.steampowered.com/app/328440/Deadlock_Planetary...
The mild alarm for me is that this won't be limited to just games.
I've spent almost 30 years building applications for the web. I've been switching my attention to different models of distribution in part because I see a desire for people to not be paying monthly seat subscriptions, but also because it can simplify my own operations - I want to move to a solo indie dev model, and giving you an executable you run means you look after "operations", and I don't. Desktop applications in particular have the potential for you to integrate them with your agent workflows.
But if I put effort into building some secret sauce into an application, and there is then a risk that by distributing it, it gets reverse engineered and then rebuilt by competitors, malicious actors, whoever, there is now the same economic risk to software distribution as there is to DRM-free media distribution. As a result, I might just not do it.
Now, some people will argue software wants to be free - build on the F/LOSS economic model, this becomes less of an issue - but there isn't really a viable F/LOSS economic model for most developers.
Per seat monthly subscriptions with remote access seems like the way we need to be, then...
The games industry will push us even harder toward streaming everything.
Would you please explain more your Ghidra+LLM workflow? What you are doing and how does the LLM help you? Thanks!
Your take is very interesting, but please do not forget that pirating games is a crime.
If you think this port is related to tour point; The source code for Command and Conquer generals (and other C&C games) was released a while back. This port uses that source code. So this port is not based on reverse engineering. The port even states someone else (manually) already did the hard work of porting it to macOS and Linux (so not an LLM):
> Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes