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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.

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To me, NFS Underground 2 is one of those games I can revisit time and time again. It's one of the most fun arcade racing games ever made.

Yeah, same. I jumped in via the website, and after driving around for ~5 minutes the main thing in my head was "damn, this is fun". And now, half my Saturday is gone...

I forget if it was NSFU2 or what but they had this in actual arcade games. For like $2 you could get a smart card to store your account, car, customizations, stats etc. Pop it in and load your ride up and my wife and I put in so many hours in the arcade playing this damn thing.

But when you have a kid, you might want to share the experience with them. They'll see the magic.

My brother has our Xbox from when we were kids and his kids love all those games we grew up with.

While many games don't age well I'm confident a surprising number of games can be remastered into a playable state.

1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)

2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game

3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want

The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.

IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.

[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/

EDIT: Shit, this is really going to incentivize game-streaming platforms (a la Google Stadia) and disincentivize gaming clients.

Game streaming is a massive loss leader (you can see this reflected in the increasingly slim per-month usage limits multiplied by the rising subscription prices), video at scale is far from a solved problem. Even with 8-12 simultaneous encodes per GPU (or iirc about double that from the accelerators) getting the density per rack to actually support the number of concurrent players required to approach being a commercial success is still very far away. This also ignores the very real logistical constraints decently routed bandwidth.

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