plz don't hallucinate my childhood

Video games were a big part of my childhood. But trying to replay and share “older” games on modern hardware is an uphill battle of cold download links, API translation layers and community patches. Source code often isn’t available, or can’t be released under license, so games accumulate technical debt from the day they’re released - without active maintenance effort, they eventually degrade and cease to function.

Porting these games to newer engines and modern, maintainable technology would ease that burden - but engine rewrites done without original source access take years and are labours of love, reserved for a handful of especially popular games. LLMs are being pitched as a huge advance in malware reverse engineering, making it faster and cheaper. Could they do the same for a video game?

Well I tried… and torched a bunch of tokens in the process. This talk is about what worked, what didn’t, and the tools, agentic orchestration, semantic behaviour graphs and feedback loops that got me closer than I expected. The result: an end-to-end playable 2D RPG ported to the web in a few weekends’ worth of active effort (and a month of LLM-driven background work).