#404: Not found

You know how Hit Points works: I pop jauntily into your inbox of a Friday and tell you, in few uncertain terms across a succession of slightly too-long paragraphs, exactly what I think about something. But not this time. I am not sure what to make of the subject of today’s edition at all. I am deeply conflicted about it actually! All of a muddle. Perhaps I will make some sense of it in the process of typing it out.

So, generative AI. I hate it. I hate the mere existence of the thing. I hate how quickly and successfully it has wormed its way into so many aspects of daily life. I hate how dependent on it the global economy has become, how it is repeatedly and baselessly presented as the answer to any and every problem, and how quickly it has assumed the leading role in the any% climate-collapse speedrun. I hate, more than anything else, what it has done to videogames: to the discourse around them, to the cost of accessing them and challenge of discovering them, and to the already pitiful job security enjoyed, if you can call it that, by the people who make them.

I have softened a bit to genAI as time has rolled by, admittedly, the binary hardline stance I initially took being slowly watered down every time a game developer enthused to me about getting Claude to do the slow-and-boring stuff, or an offline pal with a public-sector job explained how delegating the bureaucratic necessities of their role to a GPT or Copilot meant they could spend more time with their patients or students. I still hate that the thing exists and all that, and still refuse to use it myself. But if it really helps you out in some way then fine, go off. Just don’t ask me what I think about it unless you have at least two bottles of wine with you, and no plans for the rest of the evening.

Then all this AI-assisted recompilation stuff started happening, and now I have no idea what to think. I feel like the world has suddenly been turned upside down.

In case you’ve not been paying attention, the last few weeks have heralded an explosion in fan-made — well, fan-directed, really; they have been overwhelmingly, and I suspect in some cases entirely, made by Anthropic's Claude — PC ports of classic, largely abandoned games. Bloodborne is far and away the headline act, but it is just the frighteningly sexy tip of the iceberg; pick a game that only you have ever loved and seem to still remember, and chances are there’s already a Github page for its ‘recomp’. You miss Wet? Tenchu Z? Blue Stinger? Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights??? You could be playing them all, and many, many others, right now on your PC — upscaled to modern resolutions, running in widescreen or ultrawide, with full controller support and all the graphics settings, cheats and tweaks you can shake a stick at. There are thousands more out there already. All of them were made in a matter of days, decompiled from their original code and reassembled to run natively on PC by a technology that, until very recently, felt like the worst thing to ever have happened to videogames. It probably still is, too! What's going on!

This is a brilliant, dizzying, frankly mind-altering thing. It is the most staggering development for videogame preservation since the advent of emulation, guaranteeing the revival of every game that ever got delisted because its music licences expired, whose servers were turned off after player counts dwindled, or was merely left to moulder in the game industry’s metaphorical attic when a more powerful console came along. It brings to PC a raft of games for which fan communities have been clamouring for years (and Wet). It has tipped, practically overnight, the balance of power away from the game industry's overlords, who decide what we play — and how, and when, and at what price — towards the fans and consumers they have so milked and mistreated for years. It has made possible things that were previously thought impossible — Bloodborne in 4K, at 120fps, right there on your desktop, my god — or that were deemed to be dead ends business-wise given how costly they would be to make, and how little they would eventually sell (Dragon’s Crown!). In most cases all it has required is one person with a boundless love for a particular game, a modest stack of Claude tokens, and a free weekend or two.

And yet, it is generative AI; a thing I hate, that poses an existential threat to a bunch of things I love, that I have spent far too much of my time thinking and talking and writing about since it burst onto the scene a few years ago. How am I to reconcile this? Is this just the proverbial straw that breaks the Hit Points camel’s back? Is this, to me, what AI-assisted lesson planning is to my teacher friend? Is this my Satya Nadella moment, summarising podcasts for me as I drive to work? Was I a secret AI guy all along? Are we all secret AI guys and gals, just waiting for our personal use case, tailor-made to drive the scales from our eyes?

Obviously not, no. (Lifehack: if you ever need a reminder of how you feel about AI, simply spend two minutes pricing up a RAM upgrade.) But all this retro-recomp stuff is so rad, so energising, so good. I cannot think of a bad thing to say about it! It does not thwart creativity, or damage the medium: it celebrates them. It is unhaunted by the spectre of slop, since it deals solely with original code and assets. It does not threaten jobs or livelihoods, and its impact on the climate is minimal given most of these projects are solo creations. Sure, it’s at least piracy-adjacent, but who’s losing out here when we're dealing with games that you can't legitimately buy anymore, and/or have never been available on PC? The biggest exception to that is Bloodborne, an official revival of which would make many millions for Sony and FromSoftware, but I’m afraid they only have themselves to blame for that. It’s not like we didn’t tell you the market was there, lads. All you needed to do was read the YouTube chat feed during literally any State Of Play broadcast.

I dunno. I really don’t. What I do know is that in the course of writing this, I developed a migraine of such sudden onset and excruciating power that I had to go and lie down for an hour before coming back to write this paragraph. Probably a lesson in there, eh: just try not to think about it too much. I will return to the sofa, close my eyes and wait for the paracetamol to kick in. And if I feel up to it later on, I think I might play me some Wet.

There you go! Wasn’t kidding about that migraine, oof. Have a great weekend!