Both Batman: Arkham Knight and Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered were popular games at the time of their release. Released at the height of the superhero craze in popular culture and made and published by different game developers and publishers, one was released in 2015 and the other in 2022.
Last month, a creator released a game that mashed the two into a single game on GitHub. You could now, as Spider-Man, swing through the grim and rainy skyline of Batman’s Gotham in a game called ArkWeb.
This isn’t the only case. In recent months, as more mods – game-speak for hobbyists and independent creator who modify or revamp existing games – have turned to AI, a surge of such fan-made projects have popped up, taking characters from one game and putting them into another, or making old games available to play on platforms that were never intended by the original publishers. They’ve put Nintendo's Mario inside Elden Ring, Minecraft in Skyrim, and made games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City playable in a web browser.
The Era of Forever Wars #
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Read Now The Era of Forever Wars Many of these developers were using Anthropic’s Claude to create these AI clones of games. Anthropic has now reacted by updating Claude’s system prompt to prevent the tool from being used to do exactly this sort of thing. It still permits the use of Claude to build original games, but recreations of existing games are now barred.
This change was first noticed by an X user, who said that Claude had been updated with some new lines of code that read, “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.” This was later confirmed by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, on X, who said the company wants to “…to steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy.” Any original game, genre game or games that are made with a user's own designs and assets, he said, will remain unaffected.
To be fair, decomps and recomps – or decompiling and recompiling, a form of reverse engineering that involves breaking a game down to its building blocks and then rebuilding it so it can run on hardware it wasn’t intended for – isn’t exactly new. There have always been ‘modders’ (players and independent creator who alter, expand or completely revamp an existing video game by creating custom mods or modifications). But this was a small and passionate group of DIY hobbyists, and the process itself was long and pain-staking, sometimes taking years to complete a single project. The arrival of AI coding tools changed that. The entire timeline was cut down, and almost anyone with a few technical skills could now potentially modify these games.
What ‘modders’ originally did is much appreciated in the gaming fraternity. As gaming consoles advance rapidly and backward compatibility becomes increasingly difficult, the ability to play older games is becoming difficult, with some estimating that about 87 percent of games launched before 2010 are now ‘critically endangered’. Modders in a sense are preservationists, ensuring that the games don’t die out. The arrival of AI in the decomp scene has thus been welcomed by some. But the speed and lack of attention to detail in these AI-decomped games is also turning many off. For instance, last month, decomp.dev, a popular website that tracked decomp projects and provided resources abruptly shut down citing AI’s impact. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken. Our projects have always been open source to encourage contributions and to benefit the community as a whole. Bad actors have been abusing this in increasingly troublesome ways…,” the website’s owner, writing under the pseudonym Encounter, wrote in a note announcing the shutdown.
It’s hardly a surprise that Anthropic updated Claude to stop these recreations, although it is unlikely they had the interests of gaming ‘mods’ at heart. It probably took this step to avoid the vast number of potential lawsuits coming their way if the trend had remained unchecked.
The gaming industry, however, is unlikely to resting easy. This deluge of AI recreations that have hit the internet tease a future where gaming companies will have little control or say over their products once it is made available.
You may not be able to use Claude to make them for now. But there will always be others, constantly improving and available.