It’s a wild time for retro gaming. Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined skateboarding in Call of Duty? Or playing the original Halo right in your web browser, complete with multiplayer?
These are unofficial versions of games, so they may sit in a legal gray area. It seems unlikely that Nintendo, for example, is particularly happy about people finding ways to play The Legend of Zelda on non-Nintendo hardware. Many of these projects are also made with the assistance of AI, which, for some people, is a non-starter given ethical or environmental concerns surrounding the technology.
Below, you’ll find our coverage of gaming decomps, recomps, and all the other ways gamers are reverse-engineering games to go previously unimaginable places.
Just think: You could be playing Halo in a web browser right now.
This unofficial Lego Racers remake runs in your browser with split-screen and online multiplayer.
The classic game decompilation movement has produced yet another amazing feat: 1999’s Lego Racers isn’t just back, the excellent Mario-Kart-meets-Lego game is anywhere you want it to be. NavigatorSharp’s fan recreation Step On It works in a web browser on desktop or phone, and you can find builds for Android, Mac, Windows PC and Linux (including the Steam Deck) right here too.
How an online community took back the Legend of Zelda
Haeun Jang / The Verge
I don’t have a first memory of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time because It’s been in my life for as long as I can remember. Before I had the coordination to play the game myself, I would watch my older brothers play it for hours on end. When I could finally play through it myself, it felt like flying.
I chase that dopamine hit once every year or two by playing through Ocarina of Time, which normally requires dusting off my old GameCube and hoping the disk isn’t too scratched to read. But for the last several months, I haven’t been playing Ocarina of Time on a Nintendo console at all. Instead, I’ve been playing it on something called Ship of Harkinian: an unofficial port of Ocarina of Time for PC that a few short years ago would have been unimaginable.
