It used to be painstakingly hard to decompile games, a task that owner of decompilation platform decomp.dev wrote on the website last week is “brutally difficult [and] time consuming.” Newly released generative AI models have changed the speed at which decompilation is possible, meaning that seemingly anyone can decompile and reconstruct games into ports; the owner of decomp.dev said it’s broken the community aspect of the hobby.

The ability to more easily decompile software, like games, has created a frenzy. As 404 Media reported, people are reverse-engineering “anything”: bricked smart mirrors, Netflix, baby monitors. In the Pokémon community, the AI decompilation frenzy means people are rushing to vibe-code Pokémon ports and genre mashups.

Decompilation is essentially reverse-engineering a piece of software’s code. It’s the opposite of a compiler, which turns code into executables. Lots of people do it to understand how games are made, and some people do it to turn a game into a port, making a Nintendo DS game play on a Windows PC, for instance. New AI models are apparently very good at doing this. Almost immediately, a bunch of newly decompiled Pokémon games have been turned into ports, including Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon Snap, and Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver.

This is actually insane. With the latest AI models, I was able to make a fully playable demo in this art style that you can play in your browser!

People are using the decompiled code to pull apart pieces of Pokémon games and make reimaginings and mashups— one developer made a playable 3D pixel art battle between Brock and Ash ; someone else made a Pokémon tactics game ; another made a browser-based game called PokéSurvivor , which takes Vampire Survivors and makes it Pokémon.

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