It used to be painstakingly hard to decompile games, a task that owner of decompilation platform decomp.dev wrote on the website last week is “brutally difficult [and] time consuming.” Newly released generative AI models have changed the speed at which decompilation is possible, meaning that seemingly anyone can decompile and reconstruct games into ports; the owner of decomp.dev said it’s broken the community aspect of the hobby.
The ability to more easily decompile software, like games, has created a frenzy. As 404 Media reported, people are reverse-engineering “anything”: bricked smart mirrors, Netflix, baby monitors. In the Pokémon community, the AI decompilation frenzy means people are rushing to vibe-code Pokémon ports and genre mashups.
Decompilation is essentially reverse-engineering a piece of software’s code. It’s the opposite of a compiler, which turns code into executables. Lots of people do it to understand how games are made, and some people do it to turn a game into a port, making a Nintendo DS game play on a Windows PC, for instance. New AI models are apparently very good at doing this. Almost immediately, a bunch of newly decompiled Pokémon games have been turned into ports, including Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon Snap, and Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver.
This is actually insane. With the latest AI models, I was able to make a fully playable demo in this art style that you can play in your browser!
Check it out -> https://t.co/WnTtjwFq0u https://t.co/aHJqQUVLc7 pic.twitter.com/JUw1IU5k9V
— Nag Alluri (@nagk01) September 25, 2026
People are using the decompiled code to pull apart pieces of Pokémon games and make reimaginings and mashups—one developer made a playable 3D pixel art battle between Brock and Ash; someone else made a Pokémon tactics game; another made a browser-based game called PokéSurvivor, which takes Vampire Survivors and makes it Pokémon. People have always done the sort of modding that puts one game into another game, but the recent influx of these AI-driven, vibe-coded monstrosities has been exhausting.
There’s a big mix of responses to these sorts of creations. People on X are excited to be able to play older Pokémon games and potentially mod them using what’s pulled from the decompiled code. It seems, though, that the community of tinkerers that have been doing this work for years already are less convinced; as one Reddit user said, recompilations used to be “huge releases that entire communities would celebrate.” Now, there’s so much slop to wade through that any excitement gets lost.
404 Media reported on Tuesday that at least some of these AI decompilations produce source code that’s not “the same as the original, and that the resulting software has weird bugs, is of low quality, or doesn’t fully work.” Some of the people doing the work to decompile these games with generative AI don’t fully understand what they’re doing in a technical sense. If things break, they may not be able to fix them. There’s so little vetting of these things, and there’s no telling what you’re really installing.
Play in your browser and get no work done ever again, all thanks to @Einoow
Find out more – https://t.co/7VlCHB5fpz pic.twitter.com/S4qhmwtswU
— Retro Dodo (@retro_dodo) October 9, 2026
“Inevitably, poorly coded, barely-functional, insecure software is going to be installed on critical hardware, which will lead to devices and networks being hacked,” 404 Media founder Jason Koebler wrote. “Reverse-engineering communities and open source projects are going to be overrun with people Kool-Aid manning in with ‘their’ AI projects and code.”
Most of the projects I’ve linked to run on a basic level. I found the 3D pixel art battle between Brock and Ash lacking any sort of charm; it is certainly not “the Pokémon [I] imagined as a kid.” I’m not looking for high-fidelity lighting from a Pokémon game. The two mashup games—the tactics one and the Vampire Survivors-like—aren’t especially novel, either. They run, sure. I’ll give them that! As for Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver, it’s got big ”We have this at home” energy.
Silicon Valley has been obsessed with Pokémon and its use with AI for quite some time. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that having AI play classic Pokémon games has become a de facto way to test and evaluate a model’s progress. I’m sure you remember the deluge of ChatGPT Plays Pokémon or Claude Plays Pokémon streams. ChatGPT-5 was crowned the king of AI models that played Pokémon Red, finishing the game in just 6,470 steps. That’s around seven days of gameplay, according to TechRadar. People watched these livestreams, cheering on Anthropic’s Claude in its quest to become a Pokémon master. (As PCMag said, the Twitch page claimed it was “a passion project made by a person who loves Claude and loves Pokémon.” It was actually set up by Anthropic.)
