I’m completely captivated by AI-assisted game decompilations. The way these projects work is by taking a game, running a disassembly tool on it and then writing the equivalent the source code until the compiled code matches the binary. In the past (i.e. one year ago) this would involve a lot of manual labor, for example Paper Mario was completely done by hand. Once this byte-matching decompilation is done, you end up with source code that can then be inspected and modified to fix bugs, add support for modern hardware or to port it to different platforms. People are doing all sorts of creative things with it like getting Halo to run in the browser or turning Call of Duty maps into Tony Hawk Pro Skater levels, just search online for it.
All this hard work can be sped up a lot with AI: this is the kind of task that LLMs are really good at because you have a clear test case (does compiling this code match this machine code?) and you can split up the work into subtasks, with agents attempting every function in parallel. I wanted to take a stab at this and immediately aimed high, directing Claude to decompile Age of Mythology: Gold Edition, my childhood favorite game. Specifically I want the original version I played as a kid, not the remake that you can get in the Steam store—I prefer the gameplay. This turned out to be a bit too big of a target on a short timescale (and with my token budget) right now. After a month it’s kind of stuck at around 60% and only progressing more and more slowly, though I’m hoping that smarter models (surely Fable 5.5 is dropping any moment now) can do a breakthrough to reverse compile games more efficiently.
This week I was chatting with a colleague at work who reminded me that the incredible game Virtueel Zoetermeer exists. This is a game commissioned in the early 2000s by the municipality of Zoetermeer, inspired by SimCity you get to build a city while making sure that all amenities are provided for.
This game then spread to primary schools around the country—my colleague has never been to Zoetermeer but played the game in school to learn about urban planning. Everything about this is incredible: that the municipality decided to fund this, that this idea of ‘serious games’ was embraced so early to teach kids how a city works, just great. Zoetermeer later also bought land in Second Life and opened a city office in there, so progressive.
You can see where this is going of course: I needed to have a port of Virtueel Zoetermeer that I could play on the web. I downloaded Virtueel Zoetermeer.zip on archive.org and basically just told Claude: /goal create a decompilation of Virtueel Zoetermeer.zip and get it working on the web. This got something working first try but it kept crashing so I followed up with: do a full playthrough of the game yourself and fix any crashes. This fixed the bugs and now the game is stable.
The game was developed in Pascal, a programming language I’ve never used in my life. Claude reconstructed the equivalent source code, which I’ve published on GitHub. And of course: you can now play it online.
That’s not a screenshot by the way, it’s real. You can also link others to virtueelzoetermeer.bou.ke if you want to share the game. Send me an email if you decide to decompile your childhood memories!
Oct 2026