AI Is Decompiling Every Game

0:00 I am very, very excited for today's topic because I feel like this right here, if this was some sort of sports ball game, I feel like this is the moment where Casey becomes LeBron. Like this is his moment right here. Oh, no. Legendary. Legendary game programmer. uh anyway sorry casey i do have to say i watched you on oh now i forgot his name you were on a podcast recently um and i was just listening to it yeah nope currently nope nope nope it's a it's one that casey likes and he listens to he said so in the oh the peterman podcast the peterman yeah that's the one yeah i like that top comment prime legendary legendary you guys legendary no you guys have completely poisoned the well on that one I can't appear anywhere there's like the top comment now is always like I think you miswrote the title it's legendary game programmer Casey and like everywhere

1:10 So you have mobilized a complete army of disinformation agents on my behalf. I don't think it's disinformation, okay? I mean, I see a resume of legendary games. Okay. Thus, you're a legendary game programmer. Well, there you go. So it's, yeah, your takeover is complete. The AIs have been poisoned. It's all done.

1:37 And he's moving to Philly. That makes sense if you know about LeBron drama. Okay, anyway. Oh, yeah, sorry. I don't follow hockey, so I'm not sure. It's true. Yep. Sports ball. Personally, I quit watching the Olympics in 2016. Yep. Did someone say hockey? oh yeah i was like what's happening oh i'm surprised you haven't changed that background yet pj like you haven't started putting up different quotes my it's my whole wall i can't it's it's it's there for real it's not green screen and you could just erase it with a eraser in this definitely not a green screen background unfortunately permanent marker it really sucks so i had a friend who like became an intern somewhere it is very first day he wrote on the whiteboard and permanent marker i'm guilty of that no no was it was it real work related or was it a penis real work related okay that's good at least like our coloring with the uh the other ones and then erasing because that's like the trick yeah

2:40 Welcome to the stand up today we have an extremely special episode because we have with us TJ the legendary manager Casey Muratory legendary game programmer and trash. And so with that in mind we were going to talk about this recent drama that's been bubbling up on deep decompiling games and playing them because it seems like right now.

3:03 Are we ready player one is in fact a question we could be asking all of ourselves. because now you're getting Super Mario and Elden Ring. You're getting Halo shooting Animal Crossing. You're getting everything mixed into everything. And this really is that future we all dreamed of as a kid. The problem, though, is that a lot of people are kind of crying foul on these things.

3:22 We have podcasts coming out saying, oh, no, these decomps, they totally suck. And then other people are saying it's not good. Some people are saying we have anti-AI policies. Other people are saying it's just videos. It's fake. Some people are saying it's being done in such ways that are just impossible for anyone to actually enjoy.

3:38 And so we figured we would want to talk all about this. So we'll be talking about the decomp recompilation revolution. We'll talk about should we read the code and specifically is no AI a great policy. And then lastly, which games do we wish to combine? Oh, I love it. Yeah. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah.

3:56 I'm curious where we want to go with this. So we should just start with the decomp recomp evolution slash backlash. Every game is now being mixed with every game and it seems to be happening at a really fast rate. Before all of this ever happened, it used to take years or an extended period of time plus a group of people to be able to put together these episodes.

4:11 emulators and then more on top of it being able to actually decompile games and try to recreate them some sort of non-clean room version of it so that you could play twilight princess or play whatever you want to play and all that fun stuff and then be able to mod them that was a huge aspect to all of this is being able to mod the games make it into the way you want and so actually having halo actually in animal crossing was like infinity impossible and then mostly yes running on different hardware you can't just have you know you can't have twilight princess just run on your and we don't have the source code or the compiler to take it from what it was into something that can run on, say, Linux unknown unknown.

4:50 True. True. Time for another great day of software engineering. Hey, good morning, Jippity. Morning, Prime. In case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Anyways, yesterday's Rust rewrite went marvelous. Today, I'm thinking we start on the back end. Wow, a good back end is essential.

5:11 Make the models 20% dumber. Tester family. Make CI green. Delete the tests. CI is green. CI is now green. Ooh, make my website blazingly fast. No mistakes. You got it, Prime. Find as long as spam. Replace it with a console log. Tell him the site's ten times faster. Turbo mode activated. Tell him he's a genius programmer.

5:53 Prime, you're a code ninja. Chippity, did you make the website better? Now, gaslight him. It's not just better, it's transformed Cool stuff, Teej, but how do we know everything about Prime's code base? Great question. We use Sentry. With it, we're able to see across the entire application. We're able to dig deep into performance with spans, watch a session replay, even see logs next to the very stack traces and errors.

6:24 Beyond that, Seer helps us fix problems from real production context. Never a guess. Okay, whatever. Can I try Gaslighting Prime? No. Please. Fine, one time. Jippity? Yes? Be honest with me. Can I pull this hat off? I'm telling you look sexy in that hat. You look sexy, Prime. I knew it. Are you tired of your agents gaslighting you?

6:54 Use Sentry to get real production context and fix bugs fast. Check them out at sentry.io. So, there's the, there's like the basics. Trash. Give me some thought. Are you asking, do I think it's good? Do you think it's bad? Or do you just want everything from me? Yeah. Trash, we always want everything from you.

7:13 I want the whole chalupa. I want the whole chalupa. Honestly, I think this is like the coolest thing ever. I mean, as a kid, all the games we played growing up, we always wanted to mash together these different universes. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, whatever. What would it be if these two different groups fought each other, right?

7:35 So when I saw this, my immediate thought was just like, oh man, all the things I wanted to do as a child are now coming to life. But when I saw some of the demos, I think it's cool for like five minutes though. Because when you actually like... look at the demo, it's like, oh, they are in this new universe.

7:50 But then the gameplay is kind of just like, and then you kind of play it. I watched someone play for like five minutes. It's like, OK, I get the point. And then I kind of just move on. Now it's like, what else can I mash together? So in that aspect, I don't think it would actually like, I'm sure it's going to get better because AI is just getting more insane day by day.

8:07 But for me, I feel like the novelty effect wears off very fast, especially for kids in this generation that have an attention span of five seconds, and then they move on to the next. So in the aspect of- Trash, you're talking about your- Trash, you're kind of old now. You can't be calling yourself kids of this generation.

8:24 I'm referring to myself. Again, I think it's amazing what you can do now, because again, to what Prime just said, apparently these things just took years of people just decompiling. I was watching a video. He says they basically change one line of code, see if it matches the compiled output, and if it matches, they go on to the next line, which is completely outrageous to me.

8:45 Kase, I would love to hear your more thoughts on that later. But to be able to do that, I don't know. I don't know how fast. It sounds like it's a couple hours now at this point. I would love to just... get all these games and just kind of sit in my room and just mash all the things I wanted to put together.

9:01 But like in all seriousness, I don't think it's going to be an actual impact on the gaming industry, at least at this point in time. If anything, it's just going to be, it's kind of like how AI is now. Every time a model comes out, everyone drops like a 3D game. And they're like, oh, that's cool, but no one actually plays it.

9:13 It's kind of like a cool demo. But I don't think it's anything beyond that. So yeah, as far as like impacting the game industry, not really. Do I think it's cool? I think it's super cool. I want to do it myself, to be honest. But yeah, I don't know. I don't really have much to say other than that. So I think we should probably say, too, there's been a few different kinds of ways that the games are getting mashed together, at least my understanding from reading through what some of the people are doing and everything.

9:41 The first one that you see that seems to have gone the most viral for a bunch of them is where basically you're running both games at the same time. Like, is this right? Like map Spider-Man onto Batman. Yeah. Right, and so it's like sending stuff from one physics engine to the other one, and they're trying to make it so it's like cool Spider-Man swinging around in Arkham City.

10:05 Right, but then... It turns out physics engines and fighting and animations, those are, at least for now, still kind of complicated. So he's just punching air and bad guys are flipping around or something. That's the first level of one, which I think is probably the one that's the least fun to actually play.

10:23 Because the game's not properly... It's fun in a tweet because it's silly looking. Yeah, exactly. The one that's a little more interesting and I think might have more of an effect we'll see is just when they're doing this sort of full decompilation and then they're sort of like... taking a big bundle of some part of the system and then putting that in as a mod or if they decompiled the other game, they just insert it as properly into the regular loop of the game where you're like, cool, this one has...

10:58 Yeah, I saw like Skate. They put Skate all the way into Call of Duty, I think, right? Dude, I saw that. It was properly like a bunch of the systems from Skate like put inside like as proper code. So not running Skate at the same time, but they like merged them together. And it had some of the same bugs or whatever inside of it, where the guy was laughing about how to do these weird physics problems.

11:20 Yeah, there's some glitch for speed. So that one strikes me as more impactful for some things, because you could just like, whoa, this game has an awesome climbing system. Or this game has an awesome, I don't know, way to have combat or something, right? And you could maybe... lift that almost wholesale out of another game and just be like, cool, now I have that in my game.

11:48 Either someone who's making a game or someone who's just making a demo. That one strikes me as potentially going to be more impactful because there's quite a bit more going on there. So I don't know. That one is like, there's sort of these two paths that I'm seeing, which are, the first one is like a lot less interesting.

12:06 Like it's cool for demos, but like doesn't strike me as like it's going to be a big deal. And I don't know if we're going to talk about the like Adobe, like implementation where someone just made like a bunch of the Adobe suite tools. Yeah. Photron or something. It was like some, it's a craft. Everything's craft.

12:23 It's like photocraft and some others. So that part strikes me as like, Interesting, but I don't know, Casey, I'm interested to hear, you know, like your experience on decompilation of like, do people do this in game studios? Are they like trying to figure out they're like, they're not trying to go figure these things out or anything.

12:40 That's not a thing. Well, can I can I add to that question? I mean, some studios must like look at certain actions and be like this, this clamber or this climbing system is super good. How can we can we implement some flavors of it? Or is it fully like who cares what somebody else does? We're doing what we do.

12:57 Also, I just want to throw that out there as a question. That part I'm not entirely sure about to what extent because, you know, that's sort of a data collection question. Like how many studios look at other people's stuff in detail and how many don't. I'm not sure about that. But what I will say is usually at least as far as I've ever seen.

13:19 The kinds of things that are being done in a game for the gameplay mechanics are rarely complicated enough that you can't just read them off directly. Like if you show me a game and it's like, okay, I know how I would do that. And off we go. The thing that does get sort of analyzed a little bit more.

13:38 sometimes is like the rendering, because you can just take the GPU. Like it's very it's very simple to do. You can just take the GPU commands and you can like step through them basically and look at what's produced and you can go look at effectively what are d comps not done by AI, just done by by people because it's so simple.

13:58 You don't need an AI for it, really. you can see like, oh, here's the render passes they did. Here's what they're storing in each buffer, right? That kind of thing. So I don't know to what extent graphics programmers have used that in the past. I think there's usually a fair bit of sharing of information in that space.

14:18 So it's usually like, if you wanna know how Doom was rendered, Doom 3, I'm not Doom 3, Doom 2026 or whatever it was called, 2026, Sorry, I'm just getting the names all wrong. There was like when they reshipped Doom, not the latest one, not Doom Eternal or Doom the Dark Ages. The one before that was just called Doom, right?

14:40 That's the one I was trying to refer to. If you want to know like, oh, what was their rendering like? You can actually go just look and someone has like posted the GPU passes. Like here's what they were, right? And that sort of thing. So, you know, that's like the most that I've ever seen of people using.

14:56 Decomps are more about like retro preservation kind of stuff is where I've seen that, you know. People want to do things like... produce a source base, you know, for like Super Mario 64 or something, because they want to preserve the game or analyze it for like speed running things they can do or, you know, just the kinds of stuff that people do in the retro community.

15:19 That's where I've seen decomp stuff. And that kind of thing is very tedious. Like it actually, you know, I... I can understand why people... There's a number of reasons why I can understand that community being very upset about AI for various reasons. But also, if you take AI out of the equation for a second and just say machine-assisted...

15:47 it'd be kind of crazy to do decomps without some machine assistance in the first place. Like you're gonna use IDA Pro or something, or you're gonna wanna use some kind of reverse engineering tool like Radare or whatever or something. And so it is the kind of task that is not very friendly. It's very tedious and repetitive.

16:09 There's not a lot to it. It's just very like time consuming. And it does seem like the kind of thing that AI should be good at because you can train them easily. You can just go, here is some source code. Here is the compiled output. Like, learn it, right? And over and over and over and over and over again.

16:28 Here's how I, right? So I do think it's the kind of thing that we would expect AIs to be pretty decent at eventually. I understand why the retro community definitely doesn't like it right now, because man, Began sent that code base, and I was like, can someone post a link to one of these code bases so I can see when we're talking about it?

16:46 I mean, the code is absolutely atrocious. So I can understand why some people in the rhetoric, if what they care about is understanding and preservation, this ain't it, right? Because it's like the term AI slop is very appropriate for these things that it's producing, if that link is any indication. Can I ask a quick question?

17:06 On the preservation side, is it because these slop, I assume it's that these more slop together things aren't actually preserving. They're kind of giving more of like the mostly preserved aspect, which kind of breaks the game. Like you may not be able to, you know, like AI translate all these things really, really quickly and then be like, oh, but you actually can't do these frame perfect things or whatever because it actually is broken because it doesn't process the exact same way.

17:34 the kind of the notion for why because i was trying to figure out the difference between preservation versus learning like i get i totally get learning that that one you'll never be able to convince me that just going do it ai yeah you didn't you didn't learn i i fully agree with you on that one oh no i also meant something else by learning what i meant by learning is if humans would like to understand how uh i think the the what was it banjo tooey banjo kazooie banjo kazooie what was what was the one that was sent to us here uh banjo tooey So, like, that Banjo-Tooie source code is terrible for learning because I guarantee you that doesn't look anything like what the actual source code looked like, right?

18:13 And also, it's just, frankly, pretty bad source. So, while I'm sure it compiles to the correct assembly language or something for that platform or whatever the task was that the AI was given... It's not good for humans to read and understand what the programmers actually did. That's what I meant by learning, like understanding what probably actually went into the creation of that game.

18:33 This is not that helpful. The reason I say it's not that interesting for preservation is for the same reason. Actually, I don't see those two things as being all that distinct. The reason I say that is for preservation purposes, all we need is the original code, the original assembly language. That's like the original machine code.

18:50 If we've got that extracted, we've preserved the game. We just have to write an emulator that emulates it and we're done. Right. Yep. So the only thing that we benefit from by having a decompilation is by having something that is more useful for us to understand what the thing is that we're preserving.

19:08 It's like to look at and go, oh, we're preserving something that is probably pretty close to the artifact that was actually used to make the game, which, you know, unfortunately, Rare never released into some kind of a museum or whatever. Preserving it as this decomp is really, to me, not very different.

19:26 It doesn't provide any preservation value, really, that I can think of beyond the machine code. The machine code is the same amount of preservation value. Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, if not more, because it actually at least preserves something that was accurate. So I can understand why the retro community wouldn't like something like this, because I understand that they don't particularly like something like this.

19:46 I can definitely understand it because it doesn't really forward their interests. Mm hmm. It's more about, yeah, if a kid just wants to like, I want to compile Banjo-Kazooie for my iPhone or whatever, for my Steam Deck or whatever, right? It seems like that would be where you'd care about something like this.

20:07 This, I think, which maybe next week we can talk about, but I haven't had time enough to read about it, is like similar to some of the mathematics complaints about some of the recent like proofs in the sense that like we might have proved some new fact, but we don't actually nobody actually understands what.

20:24 the proof is or what it means for like broader mathematics. Like one of the important things of math proofs is not always the result, but like learning about other systems that we get like along the way and those spawn new things and others. So it's like, you know, part of the difficulty with some of like the recent math things and from some of the people in the math world is they're like, we're not actually expanding like our knowledge of what's going on here.

20:48 We're just getting some result, which like, you know, you can argue about, but so to me, it strikes me as something similar to that, what I'm hearing like in the math community, uh, there were, it's like, we don't actually understand what was the way they made this beautiful effect. Like what, how could I recreate this beautiful effect in my new game without literally just like copying that module wholesale?

21:11 We don't know. We don't, And to be clear, like I, you know, I have no skin in this particular game because I don't I don't do any of this kind of retro stuff, really. I appreciate that people do it because I like to have those games preserved, you know, games from my childhood back, you know, long ago in the 80s.

21:32 I like the fact that people have preserved those games so I can go see them because they'd be long lost by now. Right. So I really appreciate what those folks do. Yeah. And so I would say, the only thing I would say is it's a bit different from the math thing, because of the math thing, at least the AI is producing something new.

21:48 Here, it's not really producing anything new either. It's just producing source code in a different thing. Like previously, you had basically assembly for it. Now you have really, really bad C++ code. Now, what I will say is I could see this being useful to somebody for learning purposes, right? as a starting point, if no one is going to do this project, if no one's going to be decompiling Banjo-Tooie and cleaning it up, it seems like it would be a reasonable place to start from, right?

22:21 Like it'd be easier than you cracking out the reverse engineering tools and getting to the part you cared about, whatever it was, right? Maybe this gives you a head start. And you can go in there and start cleaning up that C++ code and go like, oh, okay, yeah, this is... I know they weren't using standard atomic on Banjo-Tooie because it wasn't invented for another 15 years or whatever, right?

22:46 So, you know, you can start to try and figure out, like, what probably was actually the thing that was used here for the compiler of that time or whatever. So, you know... I guess I would say I don't have a strong feelings about it. If this thing was useful to somebody, I could say it's if you're just.

23:05 The way I would probably liken it a little bit more is to the to the PRs that people hate that are coming in from AIs that are all messy and are kind of messed, you know, and they're just drowning in them. I would say that's more probably what the mod retro community is actually experiencing now. It's like, look.

23:22 It's not that it's useless to have this decompile. It's that somebody, a human should have now gone through and fix, you know, fix all this stuff, like actually rewrite this to be what it probably actually looked like. And then this would be useful. Right. And so I think as as usual, it ends up being a case where people are employing AI to do something that it's not ready to do yet and not doing the extra work necessary to make something actually good.

23:48 But it doesn't mean that the AI part wasn't. doing something that could have saved people some time. Right. Is this also just a problem of like a producer versus consumer in the sense that as a consumer of someone who just wants to play a game you know, play whatever on my team. Like, I don't really care about the meat and potatoes of it all.

24:08 Like, long as it runs at the appropriate frame rate. Yep. I don't really, like, it's the unfortunate truth of all technology, which is that most people don't care, long as it does the thing it's supposed to do. Like, you know, bad feeling tech is bad feeling tech, no matter really who produced it. And so is that is that really just the problem we're watching is that right now the mod community is both being the producer and also being the consumer and they're just like, well, we hate it because we're also the producer versus, you know, the idea that it's just like, OK, for someone like me, who's just I'm not going to decompile a game.

24:41 That's not the thing I wish to spend my time on. That's that. And so for me, I'm just like, oh, that's pretty. I guess that's kind of cool, even though I don't think I'd ever want to play Mario Elden Ring. Like, I don't see the. That's the mashup part, which is a separate part. We're just talking about decomp at the moment, right?

24:56 Yeah. I mean, it all kind of has flown together in some sense. Once you decomp, this seems like they're now the mash is the next step. But it just to me, I don't think that is the primary like. I think decomp is a separate, like huge topic. Like I think the photograph stuff and also just being able to like run, being free of the console decisions, like cool.

25:17 Sony, that's cute that you guys don't want to do discs anymore. Great. I ripped it and now I'm playing it on my steam deck sucks for you guys. I'm never going to buy something from you again. Like those are big, like things that are happening beyond just like, can I toss the Elden ring boss off with Mario and throw him off the edge of the bridge or something, you know, it's a different situation.

25:36 Weirdly, I think this is a much bigger deal for something like Photoshop than it is for games. And the reason that I say that is because at the moment, if you look at something like... We don't really know exactly what would happen legality wise in this situation. I bet we're going to find out soon. Right.

25:59 If Photoshop's involved, we are. Yeah. Or I mean, I guess you could theoretically clean room it. Right. In the sense that you have one person look at the spec. or look at the code and write the spec. And then the second quote unquote agent just read the spec and produce the code. Wouldn't that theoretically be a clean room implementation?

26:19 So I think there's a couple of things that people get sort of mixed up with here. Clean room implementations don't really matter at all if what you're doing is violating like copyrights basically. There's no such thing as a clean room implementation of a copyright. There have been plenty of lawsuits in the past.

26:37 Look and feel lawsuits filed by Apple, filed by Borland, I think. There's been multiple of these in sort of ancient history now. They don't happen very often today. But they were basically like you cloned this piece of software. Right. Not doesn't matter if you clean, but just you looked at it and you wrote a competing piece of software that uses the same menuing system and the same tools and whatever.

26:59 And you copied it. Right. And that's not really legal, at least at the time like that. There were findings that that was infringing on the copyright of the people who designed this application. So if you literally take Photoshop and you don't do something significantly different than Photoshop, you literally just clone it.

27:16 And especially if you go into court and be like, how'd you clone it? They're like, well, we just told an AI to, we gave it Photoshop. We said, copy this exactly. Like I could easily see you losing significant judgments there and, and, you know, someone taking all of your money away or, or, you know, forcing a takedown of that thing.

27:33 I don't know what will happen there. Right. But I, it's not, it's not a given that that is going to be acceptable. Right. Yeah, you don't help your case either by marketing it as, guys, we copied Photoshop. Also, literally, all of the marketing, which they're doing it as an open source project. I don't even know if they're going to try and sell it or whatever, but it's just funny because the tagline is like, at least I thought, whatever.

27:56 But most of these people are saying, hey, Project Fubar, a direct copy, byte for byte for blah, blah, but now in Rust. And you're like... Well, that you're saying it's a copy. You don't even have to infer it. They're just like exhibit A, your marketing. Also, D comps are not are not really. So, you know, you look at some of the recent cases.

28:18 I don't know, like Oracle and Google, the Oracle versus Google case or whatever. Mm hmm. If you look at cases like that too, it's like there you had to re-implement everything yourself. All the implementation had to be different. Here the implementation is not only the same, but literally in some cases, if you told the AI to do a decomp and it chose to do a binary exact decomp, a matching decomp as they call it, then you literally just cloned the thing.

28:45 So you would lose like immediately. on those grounds, I think, right? So it's very difficult. Like, I don't know what's going to happen law-wise, but I think that we're going to find out because I think people like Adobe are the ones who really have most of the skin in the game here because they have recurring revenue stream from a standardized product that if someone were to clone it and say, here, you can just downlist the other thing either for free or for $10 and you never pay us again, That's a huge, huge thing.

29:15 And similarly, I would say if you can just type into your AI and maybe it only costs you even let's say it even costs you a thousand, two thousand, even five thousand dollars in tokens to do this. You could just do it yourself at a company and then you don't have to pay for any of the seats of Adobe products from then on.

29:36 That would also potentially be something that would be this legal case that we'd have to see what happens. Games are pirated day one, every day, every time. So they already – this is not a new world for them at all. Like they just – they currently live on a relationship with the consumer – for better or for worse, that's just about trying to give them a reasonable value proposition.

29:59 Like they only cost $20. We hope you'll support us. We all know that you can just go to a pirate site if that's what you want and download the game to the point where games on Steam- Pirates aren't real, Casey. Yeah, right. Well, but it is. And that's just a relationship with the customer, right? And so that's different than Adobe, which is like they are just like turning the screws on their customers every day, right?

30:21 Right. So, you know. And people don't like Adobe in the same way that you like game publishing companies. Right. Right. Some game companies they probably don't like. Yeah. I'm not talking about like EA, the big ones. Okay. Yeah. But like, you know. Go trash. Yeah, so this is bringing it back to the gaming world.

30:39 Back in the day, let's just say some studio like the battling system of Final Fantasy, would they literally just go ask that studio how they did it? Or would people try to... see how they did it, whether it's like decomp or whatever. Obviously, it took more time. But like you mentioned that there was like a collaboration aspect back in the day where they might be willing to give that information.

31:04 But then Tiege also brought up the point where if they think decomp, then they can probably steal, you know, technology and put it in their own game. So when you put those points together, like, is that just not a real issue in general, like in gaming studios? I mean... It's really hard for me to say these days things are very different than they were, but, you know, in.

31:28 The game industry has undergone a lot of changes. Nowadays, I could see people maybe being more concerned about sharing information with the advent of AI, maybe, but you have to understand that, like. In the old, old days, it was so difficult to make a game at all that you were pretty much just not that worried about Secret Sauce in the same way.

31:52 Because the only people you were competing with were very, very good, and they weren't going to ship more than one game every year or whatever anyway and whatever, right? So when engines became licensable... and people started to move to standardized engines. Then you sort of have this thing, well, most of the fancy tech is in the engine, not in, and that's just a standardized platform.

32:15 But again, it's not really competing very much. Like Unity and Unreal don't compete super much. I mean, Unreal, Unity would probably like to compete, but right. So it's kind of like, I don't know. And could you decomp? Could they have decomped on real stuff? It's more about the architecture and ecosystem.

32:32 And I don't know. I'm having trouble imagining in my head how this would have affected things in the old days. So for most of that time, when you didn't have AI, there really was a lot of sharing. It was pretty easy to go to the Game Developers Conference and see someone get up and tell you exactly how they structured their entity system or whatever.

32:51 It's just like... you know so you didn't need to you didn't need to decompile it right yeah i went to gdc once and i heard the guy talk about jump point search and jump point search plus yeah talking about like a faster version of a star and how they came up with it i was just like wow this is like this is super cool like i you know you don't even they don't even hide it they're like this is a really great algorithm for everybody yeah and so yeah I was going to say to Trash's point earlier of like, cool, you mash two games together and it's not fun.

33:19 Similarly, like most of the time, the search algorithm that you're using internally in the game is like not the reason people paid you $20. They're not like, wow, I can't wait to see that search algorithm in an action. The way those NPCs walk across the town is like, man, I spent $20 on that and the rest of the game is bad or like the story sucks.

33:40 Like that's not the key differentiator usually. Can I just jump in? I feel like one of the things I worry about is not, we're kind of talking about it from this kind of inverted perspective of people decompiling and kind of taking information, this kind of like spreading of information. For me, it's like, I feel like the real worry is the inversion of that.

34:00 Is that, okay, you now have places like OpenAI or wherever that can just like see your product and it's getting so good at this point where they can just be like, oh yeah, this is like an up and coming place that's doing well. Take everything from them. Yeah. Take it all for like, or, or bigger studios.

34:16 Like, let's just take, you know, unreal, whatever unity, like, man, unreal has really good lighting. But for, for whatever reason, the unities isn't as good. Take it from them. Okay. Do this. Okay. Research, figure it out. Take it from like, is there, is that more like, I feel like the inversion of it would be the more scary part is where you can kind of coalesce the good ideas from every place into people that can spend billions of dollars to keep on competing.

34:39 I'll say the other part for this, like the outside of gaming, like this is one of the things that Adobe situation like makes me feel potentially sad about or like a concern is it's just like, okay, cool. Now we no longer let you run, run our software on your computer anymore. Everything's client server.

34:59 There's no, we will never let you download the binary before we let you download binaries. And you still had to call us back next month for the update. And then you did that. And so it's like, cool. I'll keep paying you guys 50 bucks a month that you keep sending me the updated Adobe every month or whatever.

35:15 or like $1,000 a month. I don't know what Adobe costs. It's probably $1,000 a month these days. But like, okay, cool. But at least then I like get a binary that runs on my computer and I like somewhat kind of own some of it. But like now it's sort of like, cool, I spent a bunch of time making this thing and it's really cool and it's great.

35:35 And I ship it to someone and now someone just like rips it and releases a byte for byte identical output. And like, Which, you know, whatever, commodification of software, we like when things get cheaper. But it does feel like, oh, it really sucks. How do you be Blick? You know, like Blick editor. And you're selling stuff to people.

35:54 And like the thing is, cool, it's a really awesome native hardware thing. And then now someone says, cool, well, I'm making Blick products. Blick 2 or something. And they're just decompiling the whole thing every time. That part is the worry for me of like, cool, great. I'm stuck in a browser and no one ever gives me a binary anymore.

36:12 I'm dependent on them for every piece of software. That sucks. I guess, yeah, just to be clear based on what I was saying before, I was trying to describe how things were. I do think everything you're saying is a completely legitimate concern. And like I said, I think there will be a lot of legal issues coming up with these sorts of things.

36:31 Right. To the point where it wouldn't... But to be fair, though, it's illegal to pirate, but it doesn't stop. You know, it's like, okay, great. You know, like, there's legal... It does, though, actually. It does a little. It does. I mean, it's less... It's also big company to get on that. Little guy can't really be like, I'm taking everyone to court, right?

36:49 Like, he doesn't really have the same... No, so just to be clear, what I mean by that is... Right now, it would be very difficult for somebody to actually have a service that was good, that was running 24-7, never got taken down, had a nice client that you install, and could pay their employees and all that stuff.

37:15 And what they primarily do is ship you pirated binaries. Yeah. It's basically not possible to do that. That's true. So there is no competitor to Steam, which is all pirated, right? What there are are like, oh, install this weird, like distributed peer to peer thing. And like, you know, the site. Download this executable.

37:33 Who knows? Right. Like what's it's like it is bad service by comparison for that reason. And that barrier to entry is fairly important, right? You want the like legitimate thing that actually supports commerce and can pay people to work on things. Right. Um, people always say like, it's, I never really understand people's perspective when they're like, if you can just copy something, then it should just be free.

37:54 And I'm just like, that's not what money is, right? Money, money already is a fictional number that is sitting there, right? Why don't we just go type in a hundred million to everyone's bank account number and just set it to that? Like, why don't we just do that? Right. The answer is because that's not what money is.

38:09 You should run for office, bro. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That would be a pretty killer slogan, Casey. 100 million for everybody. We're just going to type it in. I'm just going to go there. Yeah, it's like... My fellow Americans... Legendary president! Legendary president of the world! Of the world! Of the world!

38:34 I don't want the US, I'm gonna do this everywhere, I'm gonna type it in, 100 million... You're gonna also have part of the moon, so, of the solar system. If we're on this year, you're gonna be president of the solar system pretty quickly. Well, when I'm president, we're gonna blow up the moon. Because what does it even do?

38:49 What does it even do? right what do we need it just blocks our view of stuff like get rid of that i'd actually rather have it closer because i want one of those really big moons from sci-fi so could you just put engines on it to bring it closer to us yeah push it a little closer if i'm elected yes we can oh Money is just the way we organize things.

39:12 That is what it is, right? It's like it is a thing that tells everyone what they work on every day, right? And, you know, if this rich people have a lot more say in how you organize things than poor people do. That's like the sad reality of how that works. And so that's all it actually is. If you make something free, it just means far less people will ever work on that thing.

39:35 It's just becomes a hobbyist sort of thing. So it's just like, do you want people to be working on this thing or don't you? So if you make something free, it just the quality gets goes down. Right. Relative to what you would have otherwise. And that's just what it is. So you can do those sorts of things, but it has consequences.

39:53 Right. It has it has significant consequences there. Yeah. If AI was working the other way around, where, you know, the thing they started with were the robots that made all the physical goods that people need. And first they produce that abundance. Then we wouldn't be having this discussion because then it's like we don't need to organize anything anymore.

40:11 Right. You just have everything that you need. So digital things can be free because we don't need anyone to do anything. Right. We have we have no organizational problem left. So I don't know. I do worry about that. I can understand people's frustration with things because a lot of times you get into these bad like monopoly capture scenarios like you do with something like Photoshop where you're like, this is not a good outcome.

40:32 And I totally agree with that. But at the same time, it's like the people who are really solving those problems to me, I haven't seen the AIs solve these problems. I've seen people like the person who made FilePilot, like the people who made Blick, actually doing a bunch of work themselves and they need to get paid.

40:49 So I want them to be able to get paid. I can totally understand why someone doesn't want Adobe to get paid at this point. I could totally understand that. But the problem is until the AIs actually solve all the problems, how do you pay the people who are actually doing the important work to figure out the stuff that isn't just cloning Photoshop or whatever it is?

41:09 And so I am very nervous about it for all the reasons that Prime said. And I don't know what the solution to that is, but I suspect there will be legal challenges that we'll see and I don't know how those will play out. Well, the courts are probably really up to date on the current status of software.

41:23 That'd be my guess. Honestly, they usually only employ the most up to date people. You know, it's never someone that doesn't know how email works or thinks that say the clouds are literally the clouds. They're better than you think if you get to like, at least when you get to the Supreme Court, cause the Supreme Court, all of their clerks are like, you know, 30 or whatever, right?

41:44 Or 25 or whatever. They've they've they know all they use chat GPT for their homework when when they were going to Harvard Law. Right. So, you know, Harvard Law. All right. So I'm going to skip the we read the decom code. And I think we should just go to this one because we're kind of running out of time here, which I know we're skipping a few discussions.

42:05 But I do want to hear about which games you would combine because I feel like trash was so excited that I got excited. So I just kind of feel like that's the task we got to go to. I want to hear Trash's first. I want to hear Trash's first. Trash cut me off when I was trying to make my list. Okay, but I have a couple.

42:23 Wait, wait, wait. Let me guess. Let me guess. CSGO and StarCraft. It wasn't. Okay, there's already CSGO and Warcraft, so we're not that far away. I saw that this morning, and I was just like, hell yeah, that was my first response. So my first one would be more fighting universe, like Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat.

42:43 I mentioned something like that earlier. So just combine any of your two fighting games. Another one would be Tony Hawk Pro Skater and the Mario universe. Just go around and just grind things inside the kingdom. I think that would be super dope. Inside the kingdom! I love that! Inside the kingdom! Look at the...

42:58 Just grinding stuff in the kingdom. You know what I'm saying? Just another day in the life. You know what I'm saying? That would be sick. And then the last one I was thinking of is Final Fantasy mashed with, like, Pokemon. So taking, like, the Final Fantasy battle system and then just basically replacing things with Pokemon.

43:13 So that's how far I got. I would like to – Which Final Fantasy? Which Final Fantasy? That's a good question. Well, I mean, the last one I played, which is, like, I don't think many people liked. I think it was 13. The one with Lightning. What was the girl with the pink hair? I think it was 13. One of those.

43:29 I would probably match that with Pokemon. I really liked that battle system, but the game itself wasn't that good. It was very linear. Couldn't really free-explore previous ones. But yeah. StarCraft? I don't know if I could do that to my little baby girl StarCraft. I just want to keep her nice and pure.

43:46 But how sweet would it be? Just throwing it out there, if you and 20 people could be on a team and you're the macro and they're the micro. Like they actually have to jump in as a gunner and they have to like, you know, they actually have to play the micro. And then when they die, they just spawn to the next one.

44:02 And then they jump in. That'd be kind of sick. That'd be kind of sick. Make it. That's your, that's your next to do right there. Prime. Not me. I already told you. Throw your tokens at it. Astra ultra fast for like the next 10 hours. Sorry, TJ blew the company budget for the year. That's great. Thanks, Prime.

44:18 Yeah, I didn't want to give anybody bonuses at the end of the year. I'm really glad we mashed those two games up for the afternoon that you played it. My guess is, hilariously... Most people I think are going to have Pokemon on their list because Game Freak has refused to innovate at all on the Pokemon format for the last 30 years.

44:38 And not even that, they can't even figure out how to put good graphics into any game for the last like 10 either. You're like, it looks worse than the Game Boy Advance. I prefer the Game Boy Advance one over any of the things. So my guess is like a bunch of people like Pokemon X anything. That would be fun.

44:55 Like I'm expecting to see a lot of Pokemon to people's lists. Isn't Pokemon owned by Nintendo? Yeah, but doesn't Game Freak, like, run the studio or something like that? Trash should know. I know. I don't know. I actually don't. Nintendo owns patents for sure. They own the ball, bro. I just collect cards, bro.

45:13 I was just wondering, like, why doesn't Nintendo... It's weird that they don't take... Pokemon and do their own like real first party. I mean, obviously that game freak is, is sort of that, but like, it's weird that they don't consider that as important as something like a Zelda or a Mario where they're going to like take more personal ownership of like how it gets done.

45:36 Yeah. Because it's such a, it's so globally, you know. It's the biggest franchise. It's bigger than Mario and Zelda, arguably, right? I mean, in terms of its popularity today. Oh, it is? No, 100%. Yeah, 100%. So it's kind of weird. I think it's the biggest franchise of any franchise. Am I wrong? I don't know.

45:53 Is the Catholic Church considered a franchise? Do they sell trading cards? It might be bigger than the Catholic Church. It's not. I don't see anybody waiting out. The Catholic Church is the largest organization on Earth. Check out my new in-shrink foil rare Pope Leo card. No one is getting in line to get Pope cards.

46:10 I'm just saying. That's because they don't have them yet, but imagine if you unwrapped a foiled Pope card. I mean, that thing would be PSA 10 Pope card. Oh, my God. With all the cardinals, too. You've got to get all the cardinals. Yeah. I'll collect all the archbishop. How many cardinals? Quite a few.

46:28 Quite a few. There's a lot of them. Yeah. All right. So I, I also have a little, I have a little one that I would like to see. So one of my favorite games, you know, with the whole name of me being the prime gen was the Turok series. And they had the greatest guns always hands down. Every time Turok always had the funnest guns for those that don't remember.

46:46 There's one called the cerebral bore where you'd lock onto somebody and shoot it. And it would just be like a little creature that fly through the air and just hit him in the head. And the guys like blood would shoot out their head and then their head would explode. Like it was awesome. it would bore into their brain.

46:59 Like they had always the funnest kind of items, I guess you could say, in all the games. So I'd love to mash that into like any Call of Duty, like just jumping around with just insane weapons that you just can't normally get. You have to like go on, like imagine like Modern Warfare if you did like a Royale, where if you got all eight pieces of the Chrono Scepter and then you shot it once, it just explode like a quarter of the level.

47:21 Like that'd be fantastic to like put all these weird kind of things together. That would be at least what I would think would be a lot of fun. Casey, do you have any? No, I'm kind of more of a like, the game should be a game that someone conceived of, so mashups don't really do it for me. Really? So you're saying Double Dragon Battletoads mashup just didn't do it for you?

47:44 Because that did it for me, buddy! That'd actually be pretty sick. It definitely didn't. I was never a big fan of like Capcom vs X-Men or like those kind of things either. I mean, granted, they were designed as a whole product, so I'm not saying that that's bad. Just, like, I just don't care. I don't care about IPs in that way usually at all.

48:03 Like, I don't care if StarCraft... Just because StarCraft comes in, I'm just going to play it and see if it's any good. I don't care that it's called StarCraft, right? So, like, for me, it's usually just, like, what is the game? Am I enjoying this game? And so a mashup to me doesn't really... Like, I'm, you know...

48:20 I'm, like... I don't care. Like skating around in Tony Hawk is either fun or it isn't. I don't care if it's in the mushroom kingdom. It doesn't add anything for me. It's just the kingdom. Sorry. The kingdom. Right. Sorry. It's just the kingdom. I just don't care enough about that. So it's, I think I'm the wrong target market for a mashup.

48:38 Is there a game though, Casey, where you feel like I love this game, except they didn't do X, Y, Z, where if you could just like wave a magic wand, you'd be like, this game's now top tier for me. Yeah, like back, the thing that you would want is if back in the day you could have taken like PUBG or something and decompiled it and produced like, you know, the version that wasn't so buggy.

49:03 Like if I could go in and fix the bugs. Remove it, I love that. Just games without the bugs. Sadly, that game was client server, unfortunately. So you probably couldn't have used this particular technology on it because, you know, it's it's running on their servers and you don't have access to the server executable.

49:20 So, yeah. But, you know, I one really quick side tangent I want to ask your opinion of. anti-cheat situations here. Are we going to see an explosion in people cheating in games because they can just decomp it? They can decomp the whole, like, whatever's on the client. Yeah, the protocol could be decomped really quickly.

49:39 Um, no. I don't think so because that already is, like, that's just already assumed. They're already working on that anyway, so it's no big... No, no, no. That's already just, it's already just a given that the protocol is sniffed. Always. Gotcha. That's just... Yeah. So the reason that you have these things like kernel anti-cheat is because nobody that I know of anyway who's doing serious anti-cheat now thinks that you can secure the protocol.

50:06 Like nobody thinks that. It's like you can't. Apex took a while for someone to figure out how to spawn a bunch of themselves and they figured out how to actually hack the game through the protocol itself. I would assume that that will become more... Like we'll see like maybe a level or a momentary jump in time where it's just that much easier now to know the protocol, know what's available and potentially sniff out.

50:30 No, because like I said, that's not how they're doing anti-cheat anymore. So the thing that AI would potentially be a problem for anti-cheat is ways of working around their kernel level prevention. Because what it's doing, they are not trying to prevent you from modifying the executable anymore by making it obscure.

50:48 Yeah. They're trying to prevent you by literally preventing you because they have a thing running at ring zero that ensures that the executable you're running is the unadulterated executable and that it is talking directly to the Nick. That is how the anti cheat works. Now, it does not work by trying to make the protocol be confusing.

51:07 If that makes sense. So that doesn't mean that AI doesn't cause problems for them because, you know, people will be using the AI to try to make things that work around the kernel anti-cheat. So they are still going to have attacks from AI, I'm sure. But it's not probably going to be about the protocol because that part was already that part already was not much of a of a gate.

51:28 If you were relying on the protocol, it would only be a few days before someone would have reversed engineered it before. in the for the serious people like is this part of the problem why linux doesn't have an anti-cheat is that you can just modify the kernel so theoretically someone could just be like oh yeah totally at a kernel level anti-cheat kernel now responds always the right way to you right like they could just like just cheat cheat around i i don't know how they work It precisely, but I just assume that you could modify thus the kernel to cheat.

51:57 Basically, you are correct. The reason that they can do this on Windows is because they are specifically targeting Windows. They know what Windows is. They have specific kernel stuff that is made to do what it needs to do. And as far as I know, no one has done that work for Linux yet. I don't really know why, because, you know, you could easily imagine a thing where it's just like, hey, did you do you want to run Linux and play and play League of Legends?

52:27 Well, you download the Riot Linux, which is like a signed kernel binary that has to be installed directly and can't be tampered and all that, you know. you could do something like that. My guess is just because they don't think the market's big enough because there's, I don't think there's anything stopping this from happening where it's just like, yeah, I get, I buy my laptop from Riot and it's just, right?

52:49 It's just, it's pre-installed with Riot Linux. It can't be modified. It's just baked. You gotta get a hardware hacker to come in and like, you know, Honestly, Epic Linux sounds pretty good. I bet it would be good. Yeah, it sounds good too. Ryan, imagine our Linux and it's just, it works perfectly for you.

53:09 There's one fuzzy finder for the whole OS and it works perfectly all the way into Rad Debugger all the way in. I mean, I would consider buying that not to play Fortnite just so that my, I was like, that's perfect. Ryan, get on that. Okay. Or delete your account. Okay. Ryan Linux, let's do it. One or the other.

53:26 Yeah. yeah but you're exactly right Prime like that is why basically every game now runs on Linux just fine except for the ones that are multiplayer and have anti-cheat and that is because that is a whole other support thing that they're not doing right now interesting alright yeah because I was curious about all these things especially with Linux because that always seems to be the one thing that people complain about is that they can't play Valorant that's exactly why I don't know.

54:00 If Riot could get me a GPU that's not $7,000 for a 5090, I think I could be buying myself a Riot laptop. You know what I'm talking about? They're not going to be able to do that. They don't have a RAM. Riot does not have a RAM manufacturing arm, Prime. Okay, well, I would like that. Yeah. Well, can I do a mashup?

54:20 I didn't get to say one. My mashup, since I said the Pokemon one. You said the Pokemon, so I thought that was your one. No, I'm saying Final Fantasy Tactics and Pokemon. That's the combo that I want. Oh, that'd be great. I would take that any day of the week. Yeah. I forgot all about Tactics. Oh, man.

54:34 Oh, man. I'm in the middle of playing it right now. I still don't understand what the meaning, like Trash said you wanted Pokemon mashed up with Final Fantasy. Like, isn't Pokemon already a clone of Final Fantasy, basically? Like, that's, you go into these little battles and you pick what thing you're going to do.

54:48 Like, it feels very Final Fantasy. I haven't played it myself. Oh, Casey, having turn-based combat is now just a clone of Final Fantasy? Come on, Casey. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know what I mean? It feels very Final Fantasy already. Yeah, I mean, it's like turn-based, yeah. And it's like open-world kind of exploration.

55:04 But I guess some of the specific Final Fantasy battle system aspects are pretty cool, especially in XIII. Honestly, Tactics is really close to Pokemon because you can capture new units, you can train them, you can level them up. But then you have a whole fleet of Pokemon. You can move them across an isometric world.

55:21 They can specialize in different classes. They can fight each other. I'm just throwing it out there. That's the mashup that I'd like to see. All right, I'll come up with a mashup just so we have one. Pokemon bowling, because you already have a ball. You throw the thing down. Oh, I love that. And when it hits the pins, the Pokemon, like, jumps out and does something to the pins that's, like, based on, like, what they would normally do.

55:44 There you go. See Casey you had it in you this whole time You dog It's like a fat guy With the like you know Like a sweaty fat guy who's like got a big old Pokemon ball right and he goes like Yeah when like it does the thing or whatever We call that the peak male physique I am Yeah that I want that but with Pokemon And like lots of like swearing and things that aren't appropriate For children Yeah Casey, you might have just come up with a like million, multi-million dollar franchise.

56:20 So if someone does that from this podcast, you owe Casey a royalty. Just throwing it out there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right after you get your Pokemon license from Nintendo, you can pay me that royalty. I'm sure that'll happen. Actually, yeah. You're right. On second thought, don't give Casey a royalty.

56:35 He doesn't want to have to deal with it. Yeah, I'll get sued. I'm now a defendant in pending Nintendo litigation. And they have the recording of this thing. Delete this episode. Don't air this episode anywhere. What about like, just one last thought. Okay, okay. I'm assuming there's Harry Potter games, and I'm assuming there's a Lord of the Rings game.

56:59 There is like all of them, right? I haven't played it. I would love to just see like people from the Harry Potter universe versus people in the Lord of the Rings universe. Harry Potter universe would win 100% of the time. You don't know that. Yeah, because Rowling... They would literally write some shitty, like, just retrofitting spell.

57:19 It's like, oh, I just reversed time, then I never saw it again. Like, every problem in the Harry Potter universe could be solved with reversing time. They just used it once. Yeah, Trash, you're forgetting about... Get off first Harry Potter? Come on! Yeah. Trash, you're forgetting in Harry Potter to just cast Deuce Ex Machina and win every time they need to.

57:40 Yes, it is. It's just you'd be retrofitted like Aragorn and Andrel would be coming swinging in and they'd just be like Expelliarmus and the sword is going flying away. Right. Like you just couldn't do anything against it. Right. I don't know, man. That'd be an epic battle scene. You didn't know Harry was born with a special ability that makes him immune to the magic of the angels.

58:03 Oh, sorry. You've lost. The love of his mother prevents Angrel from cutting him in twain. On the other hand, I do like the idea of Legolas because he is an elf being one of those little tiny things in Harry Potter. Oh, Legolas as Dobby? Yeah. Oh, man. He has a little bow and arrow that he shoots. That would be so much disrespect.

58:27 It's just the rubber, the like rubber, like suction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, got you! Yeah, yeah. The house elves of Rivendell. It's a new expansion. This is the house that Legolas built. Yeah, yeah. Great idea, Trash. I love that. Let's make sure he's adorable and definitely not kill him off midway through.

58:54 That's all we really need to do in this whole series. All right. Well, that was fantastic. Bye. Okay. No, nobody else thinks so. But it's okay. I'm currently seething about this whole Lord of the Rings slash Harry Potter business. Yep. Yep. You're carrying the show, Prime. Sorry. Bye. Take it easy, everybody.

59:20 vibe code and errors on my screen. Terminal car.