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Super Smash Bros. just got a native PC port, but the news hasn't gone over all that well with many members of the retro community, thanks to the tools used to achieve it.
TheWizWiki has been very open and transparent that the port is "100% Al-generated" and says that, as a result, it took "a little over 25 days, with me, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, and GPT 5.5 as the only contributors... At many points, agents were dispatched and worked to build and test autonomously while I did other things."
Indie developer @MorsGames – developer of the modern PC port of viral retro hit Moon Child – was one of the first to raise concerns about the project:
Video game preservationist @RohanKarMooN also took a dim view. "It's such a bummer that many decomp projects are being programmed with AI-generated code," they say. "Idc that it's now being 'ported' to PC, but I don't want these kinds of shortcuts to be made. I guess I'll be happy with emulation."
Meanwhile, @UnderCoverToni pointed out that the work the AI agents performed is actually quite poor in some areas. "It’s not even a good port," he says. "There's no features, full of bugs, and the game's engine and physics are just incorrect in a lot of areas. There are no accuracy checks in place here, and because its 100% AI, a human would have to do it all anyway. So what's the point?"
The use of AI in game development has become one of the most contentious topics in recent memory, with many players calling it lazy or exploitative – and pointing out that it puts the jobs of many in the industry at risk. In the realm of retro gaming, AI has been used for fan translations, sparking further debate.
Others have defended the approach, however. "One of the best uses for AI is porting software to hardware and OSs that don't support it," says Julio Varnes / Craftyavg586. "There are games/software lost to time that AI can legitimately save. This is not gen AI, there is a difference."
Arrrash agrees. "I see people salty that the person used AI to port this to PC...and I am going to be honest, I don't get the outrage. Porting an old video game to PC isn't a creative task, hell, if AI could port every old game to PC natively, I don't think I would have any issues with it? AI is a problem when it takes over creative things. I fail to see how this falls into that category, though."