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points by anal_reactor 15 hours ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] Xirdus 13 hours ago

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.

[–] hobofan 9 hours ago

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...

[–] hypercube33 4 hours ago

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.

[–] mitthrowaway2 14 hours ago

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

[–] NDlurker 14 hours ago

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

[–] tmpz22 12 hours ago

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.

[–] monster_truck 12 hours ago

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.