SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- If you’re on social media, it’s a difficult phenomenon to miss. "Minecraft" assets inside "Skyrim." Mario and Luigi fighting "Elden Ring" bosses. And "Skate 2" characters, decades old glitches and all, grinding rails in 2009 "Call of Duty Modern Warfare" multiplayer maps.
But it's not just games.
The same techniques used to make those mashups are also being used to build open-source clones of consumer software like the Adobe Suite and Microsoft Office – programs that cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year in subscriptions.
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Modifying software is not new. Most software products are closed-source, meaning the underlying source code legible to humans is kept secret. Consumers receive only the compiled binary code matched to a device's operating system.
“Compilation is a process where you convert this language into machine language,” said Ahmed Banafa, a professor with San Jose State’s college of engineering. “This is where the operating system, the hardware, and CPUs understand what to do, because they cannot understand our language.”
To modify that software or port it to another operating system it was never released on, it needs to be decompiled back into code legible to us. To do that, coders would guess and check specific functions by writing their own version of it, putting it through the same compiler, and comparing the result.
This process typically took years, requiring thousands of hours.
The decompilation process is a near-perfect fit for AI because the solution is easily verifiable.
In 2025, a developer working on decompiling the Nintendo 64’s "Snowboard Kids 2" put Anthropic’s Claude to work in a loop, writing “in the three weeks since adopting this workflow, I've made more progress than in the preceding three months.”
Using new models like Claude Opus 5.5 or OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra paired with an open-source language like Rust, the process now takes days. In some cases, as little as a screenshot is now needed to reverse engineer a specific feature.
Last week, that same developer released a recompiled version of "Snowboard Kids 2" for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Other examples include "Halo: Combat Evolved" being playable inside a web browser, or "Minecraft" inside a post on X.
Reverse engineering software is legal, but that does not mean the final product is too.
“If you produce your own program that has similar functionality to Adobe Acrobat, that's fine, even if you figured it out by reverse engineering their product,” said Mark Lemley, a Professor of Law at Stanford University. “But if you copy the creative elements of Acrobat, that's not fine.”
“As applied to video games, in which the creative elements predominate, that means that most clones or emulators are copyright infringing even if none of the code is copied directly,” Lemley added. “An AI could copy game rules or functional dynamics into a new game, say by making a game with the same climbing and flying mechanics of 'Breath of the Wild' but with its own new characters and graphics. But if you copy the creative artwork or the characters, you are infringing even if you (or Claude) coded them yourself.”
Historically, modifying or remaking games has lived in a legal grey area where modders cited fair use.
It is unclear what repercussions, if any, the AI firms behind the models helping produce this code might face. The industry has long argued it is not responsible for what their models say and do.
Commercial software has historically lived on the premise of security by obscurity. While it has always been possible to decompile any program, the time and effort required was typically prohibitive.
The implications of this technology, especially for video game developers, are yet to be fully understood. Xbox is leaning into it, announcing ‘Xbox Labs’ on Tuesday. While it's unclear what specifically the team will do, CEO Asha Sharma did acknowledge “we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support” in the release declaring the initiative.
For enterprise software between businesses, Banafa says he expects little to change.
“There is compliance, there is security, there is patching, and who will answer my phone call if something happens?” he said. “And it's not only just Adobe or Microsoft. You're talking about Salesforce, you're talking about Intuit, you're talking about Autodesk.”
“The ground under the Software as a Service, which is the subscription model in Silicon Valley, is changing. It's not collapsing, it's changing,” he added.
Enforcement mechanisms to crack down on copied code are limited. And clones of popular software programs have already been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
A test performed by KRON4 staff confirmed cloned versions of Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop do function almost identically to the real product for basic editing. The developer admits because it's "vibe coded," glitches are frequent.
Banafa also discussed this. He said when it comes to retail customers, companies will now need to prove the features, updates, and support that come with the paid version are worth the price tag. Products dependent solely on the source code, however, could struggle.
