I recently saw these videos of games being modded and overlapped with each other. For example, you could be playing as Steve from Minecraft within the world of Elden Ring. The main character had the movements and interactions of Minecraft (even the UI!), but you would move through Elden Ring, fight its bosses, and whatnot. There has been a slew of mods like this lately, simultaneously running two video games together and essentially “mashing” them up.
This is what is being referred to as decompiling or “game decomp” if you want to sound like the cool kids who understand the lingo. And yes, on a surface level, these videos are incredibly cool, don’t get me wrong.
Some of this decompiling and recompiling has been used “for good,” in my opinion. A lot of people working with AI agents have been able to get old games from previous consoles recompiled as .exe files working natively on modern computers. Even though it might be a murky area regarding copyright, it is a vital way of preserving old video games—a fight for the preservation of old media that I firmly believe should be fought. (Shout out to the Video Game History Foundation and the work they do.)
We also saw these past few days how the PS5’s catalogue has been jailbroken and decompiled to run natively on PC. So far, over 80% of all games available for the PS5 have been ported, which means the console itself is slowly becoming obsolete if you can just freely access these decompiled versions online for free.
But beyond these funny video game mashups and the accessibility of “free” games, there is a deeper layer of analysis we need to consider. Due to the technical difficulty, decompiling a video game used to be considered work so painstakingly tedious and demanding that only extremely dedicated modders or groups of programmers could undertake it. But now that we have Agentic AI out and about in the world, more and more people are doing these decomp and recomp projects for fun or as practice. This could be leading to a dark precedent and massive risks for the future of the online world.
The Adobe Case
I am not a huge Adobe fan. They started off developing the online tools used by practically every single creative human out there, maintaining an incredibly tight monopoly over the industry. Over the years, they developed more and more tools and are today a $98.3 billion dollar company, acting as the absolute backbone of the creative industry. From Photoshop to Illustrator to their whole suite of programs, they have become essential for any design work.