AI Tools Let Gamers Rebuild Halo, Call of Duty, GTA for Free

Programmers are using artificial intelligence models to reverse-engineer and rebuild some of the best-selling video games of the past three decades, posting free, browser-playable versions online faster than publishers can take them down, according to a report by the New York Post.

The practice, known in programming circles as creating "reclaimed games," involves fans decompiling and recomposing the underlying code of commercial titles, the New York Post reported. What once took human programmers years to accomplish by hand can now be completed by AI systems in a matter of days, according to the outlet.

What Are 'Reclaimed Games'

Reclaimed games are fan-made reconstructions built by combing through and copying a commercial title's original code, the New York Post reported. The surge in the practice has been driven by two widely available AI systems, Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's ChatGPT Astra, which can automate the decompiling and rewriting work that previously required specialized programming skill and extended time, according to the Post.

Which Titles Have Been Rebuilt So Far

Titles that have surfaced online through the process include Halo: Combat Evolved, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Grand Theft Auto III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, Skate 3, The Simpsons: Hit & Run and Super Mario 64, the New York Post reported. One project called OpenCE recreates Halo: Combat Evolved with updated graphics and expanded features, playable for free, according to the outlet. A separate, more unusual project reimagined a Halo-style browser game set on Jeffrey Epstein's Little Saint James island, complete with a nautical-themed temple, the Post reported.

By the Numbers

• Halo: Combat Evolved, the Microsoft-published title at the center of the OpenCE remake, originally released in 2001, according to the New York Post.
• At least eight distinct commercial games — spanning Microsoft, Rockstar, Activision, EA and Nintendo franchises — have been named in reclaimed-game projects circulating online, per the Post's reporting.

How Are Publishers Responding

Gaming companies are moving to shut the unauthorized projects down as fast as they appear, the New York Post reported, though the outlet did not name which specific publishers have issued takedowns beyond the Digital Millennium Copyright Act demand described below. AI researcher Luckey Faraday, who used OpenAI's GPT Astra model to code a browser-playable version of Call of Duty and posted it on X, later pulled down multiple sites hosting his Call of Duty recreations, according to the Post. One version he released reworked Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 to resemble Minecraft and was playable directly in a browser, the outlet reported.

Why Was An Account Suspended

X briefly suspended Faraday's account after several weeks of him posting the AI-built games, Faraday wrote on social media, according to the New York Post. Faraday said the platform told him it had received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act demand tied to the posts, the Post reported. The DMCA allows copyright holders to request removal of infringing material from online platforms, and Faraday's account action followed that type of formal demand, per his own account relayed by the outlet.

What Happens Next

The New York Post's reporting frames the current moment as a scramble: AI tools are lowering the time and skill required to clone a commercial game's code, while publishers and platforms respond with case-by-case takedowns rather than a single coordinated policy. No court ruling, regulatory statement or publisher policy on AI-assisted decompilation was cited in the Post's report, and the outlet did not say whether any of the named publishers — including the makers of Halo, Call of Duty, GTA, Skate or Super Mario — have issued public statements on the trend. For now, the pattern described by the Post is one of fans posting free playable versions of classic titles and companies pulling them down link by link, project by project, as new ones appear.

The episode adds to a broader set of questions about how generative AI tools are reshaping intellectual-property enforcement across media industries, from code reconstruction to image and audio generation, though the New York Post's report is limited to the gaming cases described above and does not address those adjacent disputes directly.