AI is porting old games into the browser, Mario kart included
Coding agents are porting classic games into the browser, Mario kart included; PhotoCraft hit 53k stars as Take-Two starts sending takedown requests.
Porting a 2008 Call of Duty zombies map to the browser used to mean months of reverse engineering by hand. P.E. Cooper had Opus 5.5 and Astra pull the source code for World at War and move the classic Nazi Zombies map onto the web instead — then dropped a portal gun, Fortnite-style walls and a Mario kart into it. His project landed in a week of similar ones: a browser build of Black Ops 1 Zombies that MrTLexify says Claude Code reverse engineered, playable from a single link; Vheissu’s The Simpsons: Hit & Run port, now at the stage of re-wiring mission scripts; and PhotoCraft, the open-source image editor the ArtCraft team rebuilt in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5, which reached 53,422 GitHub stars on October 13. The slowest parts of game preservation — decompiling, file conversion, rebuilding the runtime — are the parts coding agents now do.
Key points
- Cooper posted on X on September 6 that Opus 5.5 and Astra pulled the World at War source and ported the map; per Dexerto’s October 2 roundup, he has since added portal guns, Fortnite building, Mario kart and a dozen other crossovers to it.
- MrTLexify said in an October 8 video that Claude Code reverse engineered the browser build of Black Ops 1 Zombies; it includes every DLC map (Ascension, Moon, Shangri-La), has no multiplayer, and is free to play from a link.
- PhotoCraft stood at 53,422 GitHub stars on October 13; the same day, DOS Zone’s browser version of GTA Vice City was pulled after a Take-Two takedown request — the hype and the copyright risk arrived together.
Background
Getting old games into a browser is not new. Emscripten has compiled C and C++ to the web for years, the Simpsons modding community keeps format documentation at Donut Team, and reVC is an open-source reimplementation of Vice City’s engine. The cost was always the busywork: every model, animation, sound and script converted by hand, every mission trigger re-wired. Kotaku credits this wave to Opus 5.5’s decompiling ability, as relayed by NetEase’s AGI desk.
In the projects developers have shown, the agents take the conversion work. Vheissu extracted characters, buildings, textures and mission scripts from a PS2 disc image of The Simpsons: Hit & Run; Codex handled the rebuild and file conversion, Claude helped with loading — converting image formats and downloading assets in parallel. Both read the actual game files, scripts and build output, and checked the result in a browser as they went.
The facts
The public projects and their status as of October 13, 2026:
| Project | Original | What the AI did | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooper’s zombies map in the browser | Call of Duty: World at War (2008) | Opus 5.5 and Astra pulled the source and ported the map | Crossover mods unreleased; video demos only |
| MrTLexify’s Black Ops 1 Zombies | Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) | Claude Code reverse engineering | Free from one link, no multiplayer, occasional stutter |
| Vheissu’s Hit & Run port | The Simpsons: Hit & Run (PS2) | Codex converted files, Claude sped up loading | Unfinished: texture flip fixed, car handling pending, missions not all cleared |
| DOS Zone’s Vice City in the browser | GTA: Vice City | AI involvement not stated | Removed October 12 after a Take-Two takedown request |
| Pro Evolution Soccer 6 in the browser | PSP version of PES 6 | No AI mentioned | Playable, with gamepad, touch and save support |
The crossovers are the part that traveled furthest. Per Dexerto on October 2, Cooper’s browser map now contains Portal 2’s portal gun (it actually fires and opens holes), Fortnite-style wooden walls, a Mario kart that drops banana peels under zombies, and Wii Sports Mii avatars fighting with boxing gloves, bowling balls and baseball bats. Teammate slots hold Master Chief, SpongeBob and Rick and Morty, with a Sith lightsaber, Among Us crewmates and NFL players also in the mix. Cooper wrote on X, responding to studios that once laughed him out of a meeting: “Thanks to AI I can finally prove them wrong.”
Software is getting the same treatment. The ArtCraft founder said on Reddit that he used Claude Opus 5.5 to rewrite seven Adobe products as free, open-source equivalents in Rust, the language he has used for about a decade. PhotoCraft, the Photoshop counterpart, keeps the menus, shortcuts and panel layout and offers layers, masks, adjustment layers and real PSD read/write, in desktop and web builds; TechSpot identifies the founder, who says he has 15 years of development experience, as Thomas. The repo was created on September 30, 2026 under Apache-2.0 and stood at 53,422 stars on October 13.
What others say
Coverage has focused on how far the agents get. Kotaku attributes the wave to Opus 5.5’s decompiling; GameRant’s October 10 report notes that a human would have taken far longer on the Black Ops reverse engineering, while cautioning that the browser build runs below the official frame rate — enabling hardware acceleration helps. TechSpot ran the PhotoCraft story under the headline “Software is over,” quoting Thomas’s Reddit announcement post.
The community is more split. A Zhihu analysis published this week describes PhotoCraft as a cluster of software “mass-produced by AI coding agents,” reaching 38,700 stars in ten days amid controversy. Reddit user theanine3D praised the fast startup but flagged that Shift+F5 fills the selection with the foreground color in PhotoCraft, where Photoshop opens the Fill dialog — and that shortcuts cannot be remapped. He said he would move his daily work over once those two were fixed.
Copyright hangs over every project. DOS Zone’s Vice City page noted on October 12 that the game had been removed after Take-Two’s takedown request, and MrTLexify has warned that Microsoft or Activision could pull his Black Ops build at any time. As NetEase’s report puts it, the new code can be original, but the characters, maps and music usually belong to the original works — anyone publishing a port should settle licensing before starting.
Our take
The signal for developers is not that AI can make games. It is that decompiling and format conversion — the two steps that used to kill preservation projects — now run in hours. Cooper’s portal gun and Vheissu’s re-wired mission scripts show the human time moving to where judgment lives: game design and debugging. Karpathy framed this shift as a funnel: about 20 million professional users have already seen an agent finish weeks of work from a single prompt (Karpathy’s 5,000-person funnel), and decompiling an old game is one of the more ordinary jobs in that funnel. If you want to try this yourself, start by cloning PhotoCraft; it is the only project in this wave that is open source and runs today.
Two caveats. Playable and open source are different things: Cooper’s crossover mods remain unreleased, so what you can actually play today is MrTLexify’s Black Ops build and a handful of older ports, any of which can vanish. And PhotoCraft is in early testing — typesetting, professional workflows and plugin compatibility have gaps, and its shortcut behavior diverges from Photoshop, so it will not replace a professional setup soon. Read its issue list before treating it as proof that AI writes 50k-star projects from scratch in ten days. In the same week, Kudos 3.0 put an AI on customer-service phone calls and PhotoCraft rewrote Photoshop — the grunt work coding agents take on is spreading from repositories to phone lines and design software.
How to try it
- Play: MrTLexify’s October 8 video description links the browser build of Black Ops 1 Zombies; GameRant suggests enabling hardware acceleration if frames stutter.
- Read:
github.com/storytold/photocraftships desktop and WebAssembly builds; clone it and follow the README, and the files it saves are real PSDs. - Watch: Cooper’s crossover demos live on X (@p_e_cooper), and Dexerto’s October 2 report lists all of them.
FAQ
Can you play these ports?
It depends on the project. MrTLexify’s Black Ops 1 Zombies build is free to play in a recent browser from a link, with no multiplayer and occasional stutter; Cooper’s crossover mods were unreleased as of October 13, so only videos exist. DOS Zone’s Vice City port has already been removed on a takedown request.
Is publishing a port legal?
No. Take-Two has already had DOS Zone’s build removed on October 12, and MrTLexify expects the same risk. The ported code can be yours, but the characters, maps and music belong to the original rights holders, so a public project should settle licensing before the work starts.