Banjo-Kazooie port developer blasts AI vibe coding as retro gaming fills with low-quality ports

[Daniel Sims]

A hot potato: Over the past few months, it seems as if fan-made PC ports of console-exclusive retro games have been emerging almost daily. This is because most of them are built either partially or entirely with AI coding tools such as Claude. Amid the wave, the debate over vibe coding has divided retro gaming enthusiasts.

Developer Dario, a major figure in the emerging PC fan port community, recently published a lengthy, harsh critique of the emerging practice of using LLMs to decompile, recompile, and create new ports for retro video games. His thread on Bluesky provides a detailed explanation of the practice and its pitfalls.

Growing numbers of retro enthusiasts have decompiled the source code of classic video games over the past few years to study their inner workings and reverse-engineer them. Using this knowledge, other developers have ported the games to modern platforms, often by recompiling the reverse-engineered code.

I still see a lot of confusion about what decompilation, recompilation and ports are and what level of effort is involved in each type of project. It's important that people understand the difference, as recompilation took a drastically different meaning that when it was originally introduced.

– Darío (@dariosamo.bsky.social) October 4, 2026 at 9:15 PM

The resulting ports can support higher resolutions, higher frame rates, mods, and many other features not possible with emulation. Ports of games such as Star Fox 64 and Mario Kart 64 have inspired an explosion of attempts to revive and convert beloved titles like Daytona USA, GoldenEye 007, and Bloodborne.

However, many of these projects use AI tools. HarbourMasters, the team behind famous ports of Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask, was revealed to have been using LLMs for years. Besides the usual controversies around LLM use, including its environmental impact and the ethics of training AI on human work without permission, many developers also claim LLM-based coding produces verbose code that is indecipherable to humans.

Dario, a lead contributor to a Banjo-Kazooie port released earlier this year, also explains that many vibe-coded projects come from amateur developers with little to no knowledge of the games they are porting. He also disputes the claim that using AI saves time.

Appreciate the gesture, but for what it's worth, the damage done by AI in this port is far bigger than I could ever imagine. Its entire organization and development is an unsalvageable train wreck. You may not have issues with its usage, but I have major gripes with it for technical reasons too.

[image or embed]

– Darío (@dariosamo.bsky.social) October 1, 2026 at 8:55 PM

According to Dario, LLMs might let inexperienced coders get a game up and running, but that was already the easy part before tools like Claude emerged. Some of these developers have faced criticism for seemingly abandoning bug-ridden projects that offer no advantages over emulation, and it remains to be seen how many AI coders will remain dedicated to fixing and optimizing their work.

For example, Dario compares two identically named Donkey Kong 64 ports, one of which used AI. The developer claims the non-AI recompilation progressed quickly, while the other stalled because of a gap in knowledge about the original game and N64 recompilation tools.

In response to the controversy, some projects have varying policies and disclaimers regarding LLMs. Some teams, for example, require developers to explain what their code does, while others only allow AI for non-coding tasks.

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Banjo-Kazooie port developer blasts AI vibe coding as retro gaming fills with low-quality ports

 

[Kirby1]

Here's the TLDR:

Whhhhaaaaa I don't it

 

[arrowflash]

I've been following the recomp and decomp scene with lots of interest, and things are advancing so fast that it's difficult to keep up. There are new recomps being released every day, and "old" recomps receiving major updates daily, as well.

I'm not against the use of AI and LLMs in the development of recomps, if the author is an experienced programmer and uses them as a tool to help speed up development, or to aid in debugging, etc. Many use them this way.

However, there are people who aren't programmers and couldn't even code a "hello world", who are churning out entirely vibecoded recomps, and the only way they "debug" it is by playing the game. These vibecoded recomps are often garbage and just feel like a preconfigured optimized emulator repack, rather than a native PC port, which is what well made recomps feel like - some are so good and feature rich, they might feel like an official PC port.

 

[NumberNine]

Amid the wave, the debate over vibe coding has divided retro gaming enthusiasts.

This is nothing if you're privy to the ambient level of constant drama in the emulation scene. It's not even retrogaming development until two of the agents go to war over github forks of the same code branch. To assert that the "retrogaming community" was ever unified is an outright hallucination.

 

[Dr Roboto]

It just sounds to me this guy is just anti-AI. He seems to be complaining that AI allows non-experts to produce ported games as fast or faster and with less knowledge than him. So what? If the games are trash, AI slop, than you don't have to play them. If they allow passionate gamers to port beloved games without having to be a coding or emulation expert, then all the power to them.

AI is a the great leveler of software development skills. AI is a very powerful tool. You can use it to accomplish new and greater things and you can use it to generate slop. The skilled "developer/engineer" knows how to harness the power of AI to push the limits of what is capable while also developing high quality code. Get on the AI train or get left behind.

I love old retro games. I had a phase about a decade ago where I was into emulation of old arcade games. It is not like there was not a ton of emulators that didn't work with a $#!^ any way. Why care if some ported games are also junk. The more ports the better IMO.

 

[scoffer]

And the world continues to sink slowly into a morass of AI sludge. God help our descendants.

 

[stewi0001]

Any time I have worked with Claude, the code has been quite readable. However, I have had it do bits and parts. I have not tried it at building big chunks of the code.