AI Is Decompiling Every Game

[Sponsor] Sentry: Catch, trace, and fix bugs across your entire stack. Use code: prime for $100 in free sentry credits → https://trm.sh/sentry [Description] What happens when AI can decompile entire games and mash them together? Prime, Teej, Casey Muratori, and Trash discuss the decompilation revolution, game preservation, AI-generated code, copyright concerns, and whether game studios can protect their work. Plus, everyone pitches their dream video game mashups, from Pokémon to StarCraft. [Sources] Casey on Peterman Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHLbL1Eg4gM Mashups: https://x.com/chasmmmmmmmmmmm/status/2105707774646562818 COD in Skate: https://x.com/chasmmmmmmmmmmm/status/2104349115521888748 [Hosts/Guests] Prime: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/theprimeagen Teej: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/teej-dv Trash: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/trash Casey: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/cmuratori [Partners] Linear: https://trm.sh/linear Sentry: https://trm.sh/sentry [Socials] x.com/thestanduppod instagram.com/thestanduppod tiktok.com/@thestanduppod facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573286173150 [Other Places to find us] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01A062kejnXFkJE01bjN5J RSS: thestanduppod.com/feed.xml Clips: @TheStandupPodClips Website: thestanduppod.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I am very, very excited for today's topic because I feel like this, right here, if like we are, if this was some sort of sports ball game, I feel like this is the moment where Casey becomes LeBron. Like this is, you know, like this is, this is his moment right here.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Legendary.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  Legendary game programmer.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Casey, I do have to say, I watched you on, oh, now I forgot his name. You were on a podcast recently, um, and

• 0:32Speaker 03

  Pecmatic.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  I was just listening to it.

• 0:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  Gurglies.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Nope, nope, nope. It's a, it's one that Casey likes and he listens to. He said so in the interview.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Oh, the Peterman podcast, the Peterman podcast?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Peterman.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  There you go. That's the one.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that podcast.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Top comment, Prime?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Legendary.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 03

  I did see that. I did see that.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  You guys. Legendary.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  No, you guys have completely poisoned the well on that one. I can't appear anywhere. There's like, the top comment now is always like, I think you miswrote the title. It's legendary game programmer Casey Muratori, like everywhere. So you have, you have mobilized a complete army of, of, uh, disinformation ex, of agents.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  It is so good.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  On my behalf.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Disinformation, okay? I mean, I, I see a resume of legendary games.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Thus, you're a legendary game programmer.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. So, so it's, uh, yeah, the, your takeover is complete. The AIs have been poisoned. It's all, it's all done.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  And you're welcome.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  To Philly.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  That makes sense if you know about LeBron drama. Okay, anyway.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sorry. I don't, I don't follow hockey, so I'm not sure what's, uh.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  It's true. Yep.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  I honestly, personally, I quit watching the Olympics in 2016.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Did, did someone say hockey?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  I was like, what's happening? Oh, congratulations.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  I'm surprised you haven't changed that background yet, TJ. Like you haven't started putting up different quotes?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  It's my, it's my whole wall. I can't change. It's, it's, it's there for real. It's not green screen.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  And you could just erase it with an eraser in this definitely not a green screen background.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, permanent marker. It really sucks.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  So I had a friend who'd like became an intern somewhere. And his very first day, he wrote on the whiteboard in permanent marker.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I'm guilty of that.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Was it, was it real work related or was it a penis?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Real work related.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Okay, that's good.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  The next like hour coloring with the, uh, the other ones and then erasing, because that's like the trick.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Welcome to the standup. Today, we have an extremely special episode because we have with us TJ, the legendary manager, Casey Muratori, legendary game programmer and trash. And so with that in mind, we were going to talk about this recent drama that's been bubbling up on de, uh, decompiling games and playing them. Because it seems like right now, are we ready, player one? Is in fact a question we could be asking all of ourselves because now you're getting Super Mario and Elden Ring. You're getting Halo, Shooting Animal Crossing. You're getting everything mixed into everything. And this really is that future we all dreamed of as a kid. So the problem though, is that a lot of people are kind of crying foul on these things.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  We have podcasts coming out saying, oh no, these decomps, they totally suck. And then other people are saying it's not good. Some people are saying we have anti-AI policies. Other people are saying it's just videos, it's fake. Some people are saying it's being done in such ways that are just impossible for anyone to actually enjoy. And so we figured we would want to talk all about this. So we'll be talking about the decomp, uh, recompilation revolution. We'll talk about should we read the code? And specifically, is no AI a great policy? And then lastly, which games do we wish to combine?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Oh, I love it.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's a good one.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I'm curious where we want to go with this. So we should just start with the decomp recomp evolution slash backlash. Every game is now being mixed with every game and it seems to be happening at a really fast rate. Before all of this ever happened, it used to take years or an extended period of time, plus a group of people to be able to put together these emulators. And then more on top of it, being able to actually decompile games and try to recreate them, some sort of non-clean room version of it, so that you could play Twilight Princess or play whatever you want to play and all that fun stuff, and then be able to mod them. That was a huge aspect to all of this, is being able to mod the games, make it into the way you want. And so actually having Halo, actually in Animal Crossing, was like in infinity impossible. And then mostly, yes, running on different hardware. You can't just have, you know, you can't have Twilight Princess

• 4:39Speaker 00

  just run on your PC because it was never created to do that. And we don't have the source code or the compiler to take it from what it was into something that can run on, say, Linux unknown, unknown.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  True, true.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Time for another great day of software engineering. Hey, good morning, Jipity.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Morning, Prime.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  In case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night. Anyways, yesterday's Rust rewrite went marvelous. Today, I'm thinking we start on the backend.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Wow, a good backend is essential.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Make the models 20% dumber.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Tester favorite.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Make CI green.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Delete the tests. CI is green.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  CI is now green.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Ooh, make my website blazingly fast. No mistakes.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  You got it, Prime.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Find his longest span, replace it with a console log. Tell him the site's 10 times faster.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Turbo mode activated.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Tell him he's a genius programmer.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Prime, you're a code ninja.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Jipity, did you make the website better?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Now, gaslight him.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  It's not just better, it's transformed.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  Cool stuff, TJ, but how do we know anything about Prime's codebase?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Great question. We use Sentry. With it, we're able to see across the entire application. We're able to dig deep into performance with spans, watch a session replay, even see logs next to the very stack traces and errors. Beyond that, Seer helps us fix problems from real production context. Never a guess.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  Okay, whatever. Uh, can I try gaslighting Prime?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Please? Fine, one time.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Jipity?

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Yes?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Be honest with me. Can I pull this hat off?

• 6:44Speaker 05

  Tell him you look sexy in that hat.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  You look sexy, Prime.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  I knew it.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Are you tired of your agents gaslighting you? Use Sentry to get real production context and fix bugs fast. Check them out at Sentry.io. So there's the, there's like the basics.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Trash. Give me some thought.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  But are, are you asking, do I think it's good? Do you think it's bad? Do you just want everything from me?

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Trash, we always want everything from you.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  I want the whole chalupa.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  No half-trash.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  I want the whole chalupa.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Want the full trash.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Honestly, I think this is like the coolest thing ever. Um, I was playing with, like, I mean, as a kid, like all the games we played growing up, like we always wanted to mash together, like these different universes, like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, whatever. Like, what would it be like if these two different groups fought each other, right? So when I saw this, like my immediately, my immediate thought was just like, oh man, all the things I wanted to do as a child are now coming to life. Um, but when I saw some of the demos, like, I think it's, it's cool for like five minutes though. Cause when you actually like, look at the demo, it's like, oh, they are in this new universe. But then the gameplay is kind of just like, uh, and then you kind of play it. I watched someone play it for like five minutes. It's like, okay, I get the point and then I kind of just move on. Now it's like, what else can I mash together? Um, so like in that aspect, I don't think it would actually like,

• 8:02Speaker 03

  I'm sure it's going to get better because AI is just getting more insane day by day. But for me, I feel like the novelty effect wears off very fast, especially like for kids of this generation that have like an attention span of like five seconds and then they move on to the next. So in the aspect.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Trash, you're talking about your, Trash, you're kind of old now. You can't be calling yourself kids of this generation.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  I'm referring, I'm, I'm referring to myself, but, um, again, like, I think it's like amazing what you can do now. Cause again, to what Prime just said, like apparently these things just took years of people just decompiling. Like I was watching a video, he says, they basically change one line of code, see if it matches the compiled output. And if it matches, they go on to the next line, which is like completely outrageous to me. Like, Case, I would love to hear your, like more thoughts on that later. Um, but to be able to do that, I don't know. I don't know how fast. It sounds like it's a couple hours now at this point. I would love to just get all these games and just kind of sit in my room and just mash all the things I wanted to put together. Um, but like in all seriousness, I don't think it's going to be an actual impact on the gaming industry, at least at this point in time.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  If anything, it's just going to be, it's kind of like how AI is now. Every time a model comes out, everyone drops like a 3D game. And they're like, oh, that's cool, but no one actually plays it. It's kind of like a cool demo. Um, but it's, I don't think it's anything beyond that. Um, so yeah, as far as like impacting the game industry, not really. Do I think it's cool? I think it's super cool. I, I want to do it myself, to be honest. Um, but yeah, I don't know. I don't really have much to say other than that.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  So I think we should probably say too, there's like been a few different like kinds of ways that the games are getting mashed together. At least my understanding from reading through what some of the people are doing and everything. The first one that you see that seems to have gone like the most viral for a bunch of them, right, is where basically you're running both games at the same time. Like, is this right?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Like, map Spider-Man onto Batman.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Right, and so it's like sending stuff from one like physics engine to the other one and they're trying to like make it so it's like cool Spider-Man swinging around in Arkham City, right? But then it turns out like physics engines and like fighting and like animations, those are at least for now still kind of complicated. So he's just like punching air and like bad guys are flipping around or something, right? So that's like the first level of one, which I think is probably like the one that's the least fun to like actually play because the game's not properly like.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  It's fun in a tweet because it's silly looking.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  The one that's a little more like interesting and I think might have more of an effect we'll see is just like when they're doing this sort of like full decompilation. And then they're sort of like taking a big bundle of some like part of the system. And then like putting that in as a mod or like if they decompiled the other game, they just like inserted as properly like into the regular like loop of the game where like, cool, this one has. Yeah, I saw like skate, they put skate all the way into Call of Duty, I think, right?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Dude, I saw that.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Properly like a bunch of the systems from skate like put inside like as proper code. So not running skate at the same time, but they like merged them together.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  And it had like some of the same bugs or whatever inside of it where the guy was laughing about how do these weird, you know?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's some glitch for like speed and so that one strikes me as more like impactful for some things because you could just like, whoa, this game has an awesome climbing system. Or like this game has an awesome, I don't know, way to have combat or something, right? And you could maybe lift that almost wholesale like out of another game and just be like, cool, now I have that in my game. Uh, either as someone who's like making a game or someone who's just making like a demo, that one strikes me as potentially going to be more impactful because there's quite a bit more going on there. So I don't know, that one is like, there, there's sort of these two paths that I'm seeing, which are.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  The first one is like a lot less interesting, like it's cool for demos, but like doesn't strike me as like it's going to be a big deal. And I don't know if we're going to talk about the like Adobe like implementation where someone just made like a bunch of the Adobe suite tools.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, Foton or something, it was like some.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  It's a craft, everything's craft, it's like photo craft and some others. So that, that part strikes me as like interesting, but I don't know. Casey, I'm interested to hear, you know, like your experience on decompilation of like, do people do this in game studios? Are they like trying to figure out they're like, they're not trying to go figure these things out or anything? It's not a thing.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Well, can I, can I add to that question? I mean, some studios must like look at certain actions and be like this, this clamber or this climbing system is super good. How can we, can we implement some flavors of it or is it fully like, who cares what somebody else does, we're doing what we do? Also, I just want to throw that out there as a question.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  That part I'm not entirely sure about, uh, to what extent, because you know, that's sort of a, a data collection question. Like how many studios look at other people's stuff in detail and how many don't? I'm not sure about that, but what I will say is usually at least.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  As far as I've ever seen, the kinds of things that are being done in a game for the gameplay mechanics are rarely complicated enough that you can't just read them off directly. Like if you show me a game and it's like, okay, I know how I would do that and off we go. The thing that does get sort of analyzed a little bit more sometimes is like the rendering. Because you can just take the GPU, like it's very, it's very simple to do. You can just take the GPU commands and you can like step through them basically and look at what's produced. And you can go look at effectively what are decons, not done by AI, just, you know, done by, by people. Cause it's, it's so simple, you don't need an AI for it really.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  You, you can see like, oh, here's the render passes they did, here's what they're storing in each buffer, right? That kind of thing. So I don't know to what extent, uh, graphics programmers have used that in the past. I think, yo, there's usually a fair bit of sharing of information in that space. So it's, it's usually like, if you want to know how Doom was rendered, Doom three, I'm not Doom three, Doom, uh, 2026 or whatever it was called, uh, 2020. Sorry, I'm just getting the names all wrong. There, there was like, when they reship Doom, uh, not the latest one, not Doom Eternal or Doom, uh, The Dark Ages. The, the one before that were just called Doom, right? Uh, that's the one I was trying to refer to. If you're wanting to like, oh, what was their rendering like?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  You can actually go just look and someone has like posted the GPU passes, like here's what they were, right? And, and that sort of thing. So, um, you know, that's, that's like the most that I've ever seen of people using. Uh, decons are more about like, uh, retro preservation kind of stuff is where I've seen that, you know? People want to do things like, uh, produce a source base, you know, for like Super Mario 64 or something. Because they want to preserve the game, uh, or analyze it for like speedrunning things they can do or, you know, just the kinds of stuff that people do in the retro community, that's where I've seen decomp stuff.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And, um, that kind of thing is very tedious, like it, it actually, you know, I, I can understand why people. There's a number of reasons why I can understand that community being very upset about AI, uh, for various reasons. But also like, if you take AI out of the, the equation for a second and just say, machine assisted. It'd be kind of crazy to do decons without some machine assistance in the first place. Like you're going to use IDA Pro or something, or you know, you're going to want to use some kind of reverse engineering tool, uh, like Rodare or whatever, or something. And so it is the kind of task that is not very, um, friendly.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  It's very tedious and repetitive. There's not a lot to it. It's just very like time consuming. And it does seem like the kind of thing that AI, that AI should be good at.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Because you can train them easily. You can just go, here is some source code, here is the compiled output, like learn it, right? And over and over and over and over and over again. Here's how it, right?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So I do think it's the kind of thing that we would expect AIs to be pretty decent at eventually. Um, I understand why the retro community definitely doesn't like it right now because man, uh, Beegan sent that code base. When I was like, can someone sent, can someone post a link to one of these code bases so I can see where we're talking about it? I mean, the code is absolutely atrocious. So I can understand why some people in like the retro, if like, if what they care about is understanding and preservation, this ain't it, right? Cause it's just, it's like, the term AI slop is very appropriate, uh, for these things that it's producing, if that link is any indication.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Can I, can I ask a quick question? On the, on the preservation side, is it, uh, because these sloppy, I assume it's that these, these more slop together things aren't actually preserving? They're kind of giving more of like the, the mostly preserved aspect, which kind of breaks the game. Like you may not be able to, uh, you know, like AI translate all these things really, really quickly and then be like, oh, but you actually can't do these frame perfect things or whatever. Because it actually is broken because it doesn't process the exact same way. Is that, is that the kind of the notion for why? Cause I was trying to figure out the difference between preservation versus learning. Like I get, I totally get learning. That, that one you'll never be able to convince me that just going, do it AI. Yeah, you didn't, you didn't learn. I, I fully agree with you on that one.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Oh no, I also meant something else by learning. What I meant by learning is if humans would like to understand how, uh, I think the, the, what was it? Banjo Toei, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Kazooie, what was, what was the one that was sent to us here?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  It was Toei.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  So like, uh, that Banjo Toei source code is terrible for learning because I guarantee you that doesn't look anything like what the actual source code looked like, right? And, and also it's just frankly, pretty bad source. So while I'm sure it compiles to the correct assembly language or something for that platform or whatever the task was that the AI was given. It's not good for humans to read and understand what the programmers actually did. That's what I meant by learning, like understanding what probably actually went into the creation of that game. This is not that helpful. Uh, the reason I say it's not that interesting for preservation is for the same reason, actually. I don't see those two things as being all that distinct. The reason I say that is for preservation purposes, all we need is the original code, the original assembly language.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  That's like the original machine code. If we've got that extracted, we've preserved the game. We just have to write an emulator that emulates it and we're done, right?

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  So the only thing that we benefit from by having a decompilation is by having something that is more useful for us to understand what the thing is that we're preserving, right? It's like to look at and go, oh, we're, we're preserving something that is probably pretty close to the artifact that was actually used to make the game, which, you know, unfortunately rare never, you know, released into some kind of a, a museum or whatever. Preserving it as this decomp is really to me not very different. It doesn't provide any preservation value really that I can think of beyond the machine code. The machine code is the same amount of preservation value, um, as, as far as I'm concerned, if not more, because it actually at least preserves something that was accurate.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  So I can understand why the retro community wouldn't like something like this. Um, because I understand that they don't particularly like something like this. I can definitely understand it because it doesn't really forward their interests.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  It's more about, yeah, if, if, you know, a kid just wants to like, I want to compile Banjo Kazooie for my, for my iPhone or whatever, you know, for my, for my, uh, for my Steam deck or whatever, right? It seems like that, that would be where you'd care about something like this. This, I think, which maybe next week we can talk about, but I haven't had time enough to read about it, is like similar to some of the mathematics complaints about some of the recent like proofs, in the sense that like, we might have proved some new fact, but we don't actually, nobody actually understands what the proof is, or what it means for like broader mathematics. Like, one of the important things of math proofs is not always the result, but like, learning about other systems that we get like along the way,

• 20:34Speaker 02

  and those spawn new things and other, so it's like, you know, part of the difficulty with some of like the recent math things, and from some of the people in the math world, is they're like, "We're not actually expanding like our knowledge of what's going on here. We're just getting some result," which like, you know, you can argue about. But so, to me, it strikes me as something similar to that, what I'm hearing like in the math community. There, where it's like, "We don't actually understand, what was the way they made this beautiful effect? Like, what, how could I recreate this beautiful effect in my new game, without literally just like copying that module wholesale? We don't know, we don't, the technology's lost, you know."

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And, uh, to be clear, like, I, you know, I have no skin in this particular game, because I don't, I don't do any of this kind of, uh, retro stuff, really. I appreciate that people do it, because I like to have those games preserved, you know, games from my childhood, uh, back, you know, long ago in the eighties. I like the fact that people have preserved those games, so I can go, you know, see them, because they're, they'd be long lost by now, right? So I really appreciate what those folks do. Um, and so, I would say, the only thing I would say is it's a bit different from the math thing, because the math thing, at least the AI is producing something new. Here, it's not really producing anything new either, right? It's just doing, it's just producing source code in a different thing. Like, previously you had basically assembly for it,

• 21:57Speaker 01

  now you have, you know, really, really bad C++ code, right? Now, what I will say is, I could see this being useful to somebody for learning purposes, as a starting point, if no one is, you know, if, if no one is going to do this project, if no one's going to be decompiling Banjo 2 and cleaning it up, uh, it seems like it would be a reasonable place to start from, right? Like, it'd be easier than you cracking out, um, you know, the, the reverse engineering tools, and getting to the part you cared about, whatever it was, right? Maybe this gives you, um, a head start, and you can go in there and start cleaning up that C++ code, and go like, "Oh, okay, yeah, this is, I, I know they weren't using standard atomic on Banjo 2,

• 22:42Speaker 01

  because it wasn't invented for another 15 years," or whatever, right? Um, so, you know, you can start to try and figure out like, what probably was actually the thing that was used here for the compiler of that time, or whatever. So, I, you know, I guess, uh, I would say I don't have as strong a feelings about it, if, if this thing was useful to somebody, I could say it's, if you're just, the way I would probably liken it a little bit more is to the, to the, the PRs that people hate, that are coming in from AIs that are all messy, and are kind of messed, you know, and they're just drowning in them. I would say that's more probably what the mod retro community is actually experiencing now. It's like, "Look, it's not that it's useless to have this decompile,

• 23:24Speaker 01

  it's that somebody, a human, should have now gone through and fixed, you know, fix all this stuff, like, actually rewrite this to be what it probably actually looked like, uh, and then this would be useful, right? Uh, and so I think, as, as usual, it ends up being a case where people are employing AI to do something that it's not ready to do yet, and, and not doing the extra work necessary to make something actually good. But it doesn't mean that the AI part wasn't doing something that could have saved people some time, right?"

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Is this also just a problem of like, uh, producer versus consumer? In the sense that, as a consumer of someone who just wants to play a, you know, play whatever on my Steam, like, I don't really care about the meat and potatoes of it all, like, as long as it runs at the appropriate frame rate.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  I don't really, like, it's the unfortunate truth of all technology, which is that most people don't care, as long as it does the thing it's supposed to do. Like, that, you know, bad feeling tech is bad feeling tech, no matter really who produced it. And so, is that, is that really just the problem we're watching? Is that, right now, the mod community is both being the producer and also being the consumer, and they're just like, "Well, we hate it, because we're also the producer," versus, you know, the idea that it's just like, "Okay, for someone like me, who's just, I'm not gonna decompile a game. That's not the thing I wish to spend my time on." That's that, and so for me, I'm just like, "Oh, that's pretty, that's, I guess that's kind of cool, even though, I don't think I'd ever want to play Mario Elden Ring." Like, I don't see the, um, the tracks of it all.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  That's the MASH part, which is a separate part. We're just talking about decomp at the moment, right?

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, but I mean, it all kind of has flown together in some sense, once you decomp, it seems like there now, the MASH is the next step, but, uh, it just, to me, it just seems like we're having a-

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I don't think that is the primary, like, I think decomp is a separate, like, huge topic. Like, I think the photo craft stuff, and also just being able to like run, being free of the console decisions, like, "Cool, Sony, that's cute, that you guys don't want to do discs anymore, great. I ripped it, and now I'm playing it on my Steam Deck. Sucks for you guys, I'm never gonna buy something from you again." Like, those are big, like, things that are happening, beyond just like, "Can I toss the Elden Ring boss off with Mario, and throw him off the edge of the bridge," or something, you know, it's a different situation.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Weirdly, I think Photoshop, I think this is a much bigger deal for something like Photoshop than it is for games, because, and the reason that I say that is because, um, at the moment, you know, if you look at something like, uh, we, we don't really know exactly what would happen legality-wise in this situation. I, I bet we're gonna find out soon, right?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's not a clean room, right? We are, yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Or, I mean, I guess you could theoretically clean room it, right? In the sense that you have one person look at the spec, or look at the code and write the spec, and then the second quote-unquote agent just read the spec and produce the code? Wouldn't that theoretically be a clean room implementation?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  So I think there's a couple of things that people get sort of mixed up with here. Clean room implementations don't really matter at all, if what you're doing is violating like copyrights, basically. There's no such thing as a clean room implementation, re-implementation of a copyright. There have been plenty of lawsuits in the past, look and feel lawsuits, filed by Apple, filed by, uh, Borland, I think. There's been multiple of these in sort of ancient history now. They don't happen very often today. Uh, but they were basically like, "You cloned this piece of software," right? Not, doesn't matter if you cleaned it, just you looked at it, and you wrote a competing piece of software that uses the same menuing system, and the same tools, and whatever, and you copied it, right? And that's not really legal, at least at, at the time, like that,

• 27:04Speaker 01

  they, there were findings that that was infringing on the copyright of the people who designed this application. So if you literally take Photoshop, and you don't do something significantly different than Photoshop, you literally just clone it, uh, and especially if you go into court and be like, "How'd you clone it?" They're like, "Well, we just told an AI to, we gave it Photoshop, we said, 'Copy this exactly.'" Like, I could easily see you losing significant judgments there, and, and, you know, someone taking all, all of your money away, or, or, uh, you know, forcing a takedown of that thing. I don't know what will happen there, right? But I, it's not, it's not a given that that is going to be, uh, acceptable, right?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't help your case either by marketing it as, "Guys, we copied Photoshop." Just like, also the, also literally all of the mark, you know, which, they're doing it as an open source project, I don't even know if they're gonna try and sell it, or whatever, but it's just like funny, because the tagline is like, "At least I thought, whatever." But most of these people are saying, "Hey, Project Fubar, a direct copy, a byte for byte for zop, blah blah, but now in Rust." And you're like, "Well, that, you're saying it's a copy? You don't even have to infer it, they're just like, Exhibit A, you're marketing."

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Also, decomp's are not, are not really, so, you know, you look at some of the recent cases, I, I don't know, like, um, Oracle and Google, the Oracle versus Google case, or whatever. If you look at cases like that, too, it's like, there you had to re-implement everything yourself, right? All the implementation had to be different. Here, the implementation is not only the same, but literally, in some cases, if you told the AI to do a decomp, and it chose to do a binary exact decomp, a matching decomp, as they call it, then you literally just cloned the thing. So you would lose like immediately, on those grounds, I think, right? So, it's very difficult, like, like, I don't know what's gonna happen law-wise, but I think that we're going to find out,

• 28:58Speaker 01

  because I think people like Adobe are the ones who really have most of the skin in the game here, because they have recurring revenue stream from a standardized product, that if someone were to clone it and say, "Here, you can just download this other thing, either for free or for $10, and you never pay us again." That's a huge, huge thing. And, uh, similarly, I would say if you can just type into your AI, and maybe it only costs you even, let's say it even costs you $1,000, $2,000, even $5,000 in, uh, tokens to do this, you could just do it yourself at a company, and then you don't have to pay for any of the seats of Adobe products from then on. That would also potentially be something that would, you know, be this legal case, that we'd have to see what happens.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Games are pirated day one, every day, every time. So they already, this is not a new world for them at all. Like, they just, they currently live on a relationship with the consumer, for better or for worse, that's just about trying to give them a reasonable value proposition. "The thing only costs $20, we hope you'll support us." We, we all know that you can just go to a pirate site, if that's what you want, and download the game, to the point where games on Steam-

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Pirates aren't real, Casey.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Well, but, but it is, and that's, that's just a relationship with the customer, right? And so that's different than Adobe, which is like, they, they are just like turning the screws on their customers every day, right? Uh, so, you know, anyway, I'll stop talking now.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  And people don't like Adobe in the same way that you like game publishing companies.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Some game companies, they probably don't like the same way they like Adobe.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm not talking about like EA, the big ones, okay?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  But like, you know-

• 30:34Speaker 02

  I think-

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Go trash. Yeah, so this is bringing it back to like the gaming world. Like, back in the day, if, uh, let's just say some studio liked the battling system of Final Fantasy, would they literally just go ask that studio like how they did it? Or would people try to, like, see how they did it, whether it's like decomp or whatever? Obviously, it took more time, but like, you mentioned that there was like a collaboration aspect back in the day, where they, they might be willing to give that information, but then Tej also brought up the point where, if they think decomp, then they can probably steal, you know, technology and put it in their own game. So when you put those points together, like, is that just not a real issue in general? Like, in gaming studios?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it's really hard for me to say. These days, things are very different than they were, but, you know, in-

• 31:28Speaker 01

  The game industry has undergone a lot of changes. Nowadays, I could see people maybe being more concerned about sharing information with the advent of AI, maybe. But you have to understand that like,

• 31:43Speaker 01

  in the old, in the old, old days, it was so difficult to make a game at all, that you were pretty much just not that worried about secret sauce in the same way. Cause like the only people you were competing with were very, very good and they weren't going to ship more than one game every year or whatever anyway and whatever, right? So when engines became licensable and people started move to standardized engines, then you sort of had this thing, well, most of the fancy tech is in the engine. Not in, and that's just a standardized platform, but again, it's not really competing very much. Like Unity and Unreal don't compete super much. I mean, Unreal, Unity would probably like to compete more, but right? So it's kind of like, I don't know.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And could you decomp, could they have decomped Unreal stuff? It's, it's more about the architecture and ecosystem and like, I don't know. Like I'm having trouble imagining in my head, like how this would have affected things in the old days. So for most of that time, when you didn't have AI,

• 32:42Speaker 01

  there really was a lot of sharing. It was pretty easy to go to like, you know, the game developers conference and see someone get up and tell you exactly how they structured their entity system or whatever. Right? It's just like, you know, so you didn't need to, you didn't need to decompile it, right?

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I went to GDC once and I heard the guy talk about jump point search and jump point search plus.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Talking about like a faster version of A* and how they came up with it. And I was just like, wow, this is like, this is super cool. Like, you know, you didn't even, they don't even hide it. They're like, this is a really great algorithm for everybody.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  I was gonna say to Trash's point earlier of like, cool, you mashed two games together and it's not fun. Similarly, like most of the time, the search algorithm that you're using internally in the game is like, not the reason people paid you $20. They're not like, wow, I can't wait to see that search algorithm in action. The way those NPCs walk across the town is like, man, I spent $20 on that and the rest of the game is bad. Or like, the story sucks. Like, that's not the key differentiator usually.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Can I, can I just jump in? I feel like one of the things I worry about is not, we're kind of talking about it from this kind of inverted perspective of people decompiling and kind of taking information, this kind of like spreading of information. For me, it's like, I feel like the real worry is the inversion of that. Is that, okay, you now have places like OpenAI or wherever that can just like see your product. And it's getting so good at this point where they can just be like, oh yeah, this is like an up and coming place that's doing well. Take everything from them, you know?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Man, take it all for like, or, or bigger studios, like let's just take, you know, Unreal, whatever, Unity. They're like, man, Unreal has really good lighting, but for whatever reason, Unity's isn't as good. Take it from them. Okay, do this. Okay, research, figure it out, take it from them. Like, is there, is that more like, I feel like the inversion of it would be the more scary part is where you can kind of coalesce the good ideas from every place into people that can spend billions of dollars to keep on competing.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I'll say the other part for this, like the outside of gaming, like this is one of the things, the Adobe situation like makes me feel potentially sad about or like a concern is it's just like, okay, cool. Now we no longer let you run, run our software on your computer. Everything's client server. There's no, we will never let you download the binary. Before we let you download binaries and you still had to call us back next month for the update. And then you did that. And so it's like, cool, I'll keep paying you guys 50 bucks a month. And you keep sending me the updated Adobe every month or whatever, or like a thousand dollars a month. I don't know what Adobe costs. It's probably a thousand dollars a month these days. But like, okay, cool.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  But at least then, at least then I like get a binary that runs on my computer and I like somewhat kind of own some of it. But like now, it's sort of like, cool, I spent a bunch of time making this thing and it's really cool and it's great. And I ship it to someone and now someone just like rips it and releases a byte for byte identical output. And like, which, you know, whatever commodification of software, we like when things get cheaper, but it does feel like, oh, it really sucks. How do you, how do you be Blick, you know, like Blick editor? And you're selling stuff to people and like, the thing is, cool, it's a really awesome native hardware thing. And then now someone says, cool, well, I'm making Blick, Blick 2 or something. And they're just decompiling the whole thing every time.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Like that part is the worry for me of like, cool, great. I'm stuck in a browser and no one ever gives me a binary anymore. I, I'm dependent on them for every piece of software. That sucks.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  I, I guess like, yeah, just to be clear, based on from what I was saying before, I was trying to describe how things were. I, I do think everything you're saying is a completely legitimate concern. And like I said, I think there will be a lot of legal issues coming up with these sorts of things. To the point where

• 36:33Speaker 02

  But to be fair though, it's illegal to pirate, but it doesn't stop. You know, it's like, okay, great. You know, like there's legal.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  It does, it does though, actually, this is

• 36:41Speaker 02

  It does a little, it does. Yeah. I mean, it's less.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  It's also a big company get to get on that little guy can't really be like, I'm taking everyone to court, right? Like he doesn't really have the same

• 36:51Speaker 01

  No. So, so just to be clear, what I mean by that is right now, it would be very difficult for somebody to produce, you know, actually have a service that was good, that was running 24/7, never, never got taken down. Had a nice like client that you install and, and could pay their employees and all that stuff. And what they primarily do is ship you pirated binaries. It's basically not possible to do that.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So there is no competitor to Steam, which is all pirated, right? What there are are like, oh, install this weird like distributed peer-to-peer thing. And like, you know, the sites

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Download this executable.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Who knows, right? Like what's going, it's like, it is bad service by comparison for that reason. And that barrier to entry is fairly important, right? You want the like legitimate thing that actually supports commerce and can pay people to work on things. People always say like, it's, I never really understand people's perspective when they're like, if you can just copy something, then it should just be free. And I'm just like, that's not what money is, right? Money, money already is a fictional number that is sitting there, right? Why don't we just go type in a hundred million to everyone's bank account number and just set it to that? Like, why don't we just do that? Right? The answer is because that's not what money is.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Casey, you should run for office, bro.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  That would be a pretty killer slogan, Casey. A hundred million for everybody.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  We're just gonna type it in. I'm just gonna go there. Yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  My fellow Americans.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Legendary president.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Legendary president of the world, of the world, of the world. I don't just, I don't want the US, I'm gonna do this everywhere. I'm gonna type it in, a hundred million.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  You're gonna also have part of the moon, so of the solar system. If we're honest here, you're gonna be president of the solar system pretty quick.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Well, when I'm president, we're gonna blow up the moon. Because what does it even do? What does it even do? Right? What do we need? It just blocks our view of stuff. Like get rid of that thing.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  I'd actually rather have it closer because I want one of those really big moons from sci-fi. So could you just put engines on it to bring it closer to us?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, push it a little closer.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  If I'm elected, yes, we can.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Money is just the way we organize things. That is what it is, right? It's like, it is a thing that, that tells everyone what they work on every day, right? And, you know, if this rich people have a lot more say in how you organize things than poor people do. That's like the sad reality of how that works. And so that's all it actually is. If you make something free, it just means far less people will ever work on that thing. It's just becomes a hobbyist sort of thing. So it's just like, do you want people to be working on this thing or don't you? So if you make something free, it just, the quality gets, goes down, right? Relative to what you would have otherwise. And that's just what it is. So you can do those sorts of things, but it has consequences, right? It has, it has significant consequences there.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  If AI was working the other way around, where, you know, the, the thing they started with were the robots that made all the physical goods that people need. And first they produced that abundance, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because then it's like, we don't need to organize anything anymore, right? You just have everything that you need. So digital things can be free because we don't need anyone to do anything, right? We have, we have no organizational problem left. So I don't know. I, I do worry about that. I can understand people's frustration with things because a lot of times you get into these bad like monopoly capture scenarios like you do with something like Photoshop. Where you're like, this is not a good outcome. And I totally agree with that. But at the same time, it's like the people who are really solving those problems to me, I haven't seen the AIs solve these problems.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  I've seen people like the person who made FilePilot, like the people who made Blick, actually doing a bunch of work themselves. And they need to get paid. So I want them to be able to get paid. I can totally understand why someone doesn't want Adobe to get paid at this point, right? I could totally understand that, right? But, but the, the problem is until the AIs actually solve all the problems, how do you pay the people who are actually doing the important work to figure out the stuff that isn't just cloning Photoshop or whatever it is, right? And so, so I am very nervous about it for all the reasons that Prime said. And I don't, I don't know what the solution to that is, but I suspect there will be legal challenges

• 41:18Speaker 01

  that we'll see. And I don't know how those will play out.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Well, the courts are probably really up to date on the current status of software. That'd be my guess.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Honestly, they usually only employ the most up to date people. You know, it's never someone that doesn't know how email works or things that say the clouds are literally the clouds.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  They're, they're better than you think. If you get to like, at least when you get to Supreme Court. Cause the Supreme Court, all of their clerks are like, you know, 30 or whatever, right? Or 25, you know, or whatever. They've, they've, they know all, they, they use ChatGPT for their homework when they, when they were going to Harvard Law, right? So, you know.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Harvard Law. All right. So I'm gonna skip the, we read the decomp code. And I think we should just go to this one because we're kind of running out of time here. Which I know we're skipping a few discussions, but I do want to hear about which games you would combine. Cause I feel like Trash was so excited that I got excited. So I just kind of feel like that's the task we gotta go to.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  I wanna hear Trash's first.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wanna hear Trash's first.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  You guys cut me off, but I was trying to make my list. Okay, but I have a couple.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait, let me guess, let me guess.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  CS:GO and StarCraft.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  It wasn't.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Okay, there's already CS:GO and Warcraft, so you know, we're not that far away.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  I saw that this morning and I was just like, hell yeah, that was like my first response.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  So my first one would be like a more fighting universe, like Street Fighter first more combat. I mentioned something like that earlier. So just combine any of your two fighting games. Another one would be like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and the Mario universe. Just go around and just grind things inside the kingdom. I think that would be super dope.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Inside the kingdom.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Just grinding stuff in the kingdom.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  You know what I'm saying? Just another day in the life. You know what I'm saying? That'd be sick. And then the last one I was thinking of is Final Fantasy mashed with like Pokemon. So taking like the Final Fantasy battle system and then just basically replacing things with Pokemon. So that's how far I got. I would like to, when you.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Which Final Fantasy? Which Final Fantasy?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  That's a good question.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I mean, the last one I played, which is like, I don't think many people liked. I think it was 13, the one with lightning, the girl with the pink hair. I think it was 13, one of those. I would probably mash that with Pokemon. I like, I really liked that battle system, but the game itself wasn't that good. Like it's very linear, couldn't really like free explore like previous ones.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  But yeah, Starcraft. I don't know if I could do that to my, to my little baby girl, Starcraft. I just want to keep her nice and pure, you know what I mean?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  But how sweet would it be? I mean, just throwing it out there. If you and like 20 people could be on a team and you're the macro and they're the micro. Like they actually have to jump in as a gunner and then they have to like, you know, they actually have to play the micro. And then when they die, they just spawn to the next one and then they jump in.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  That'd be kind of sick. That'd be kind of sick. Make it. That's your, that's your next to do right there, Prime.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  I, not me. I already told you.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Throw all the tokens. Throw your tokens at it.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Astro, Astro ultra fast for like the next 10 hours. Sorry TJ blew the company budget for the year.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  That's great. Thanks, Prime. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't want to give anybody bonuses at the end of the year. I'm really glad we mashed those two games up for the afternoon that you played it.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  I, my guess is hilariously, most people I think are going to have Pokemon on their list because Game Freak has refused to innovate at all on the Pokemon format for the last 30 years. And not even that, they can't even figure out how to put good graphics into any game for the last like 10 either. You're like, it looks worse than the Game Boy Advance. I prefer the Game Boy Advance one over any of the things. So my guess is like a bunch of people like Pokemon X, anything. That would be fun. Like, um, I, I'm expecting to see a lot of Pokemon on people's lists.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Isn't, isn't Pokemon owned by Nintendo?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but doesn't Game Freak like run the studio or something like that?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Right. So what I was.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Trash should know.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  I know what I was wondering.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  I actually don't.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Nintendo owns patents for sure. They own the ball.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  I just collect cards, bro.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  I was just wondering like, why doesn't Nintendo, it's weird that they don't take Pokemon and do their own like real first party. I mean, obviously that Game Freak is, is sort of that, but like it's weird that they don't consider that as important as something like a Zelda or a Mario where they're going to like take more personal ownership of like how it gets done.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Because it's such a, it's so globally.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  It's the biggest franchise.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  It's, it's bigger than Mario and Zelda arguably, right? I mean, in terms of its popularity today.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  No, 100%. Yeah, 100%.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  So it's kind of weird.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  I think it's the biggest franchise of any franchise.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  So, so.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Am I wrong?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Is the Catholic Church considered a franchise?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Do they sell trading cards?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  It's bigger than the Catholic Church.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  It's not. No.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  I don't see anybody waiting out.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Church is the largest organization on earth.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Check out my new and shrink foil rare Pope Leo card.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  No one is getting the, you know, getting in line to get Pope cards. I'm just saying.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Uh, that's because they don't have them yet, but imagine if you unwrapped a foiled Pope card. I mean, that thing would be.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  PSA 10 Pope card. Oh my God.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  With all the Cardinals too. You gotta get all the Cardinals.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  I'll collect all the Cardinals.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Archbishop.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  How many Cardinals are there? There's quite a few.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Quite a few.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  There's a lot of them. Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  All right. So I, I also.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Gotta catch them all.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Have a little, I have a little one that I would like to see. So one of my favorite games, you know, with the whole name of me being the Prime Gen was the Turok series. And, uh, they had the greatest guns always. Hands down, every time Turok always had the funnest guns. For those that don't remember, there's one called the cerebral bore where you'd lock onto somebody and shoot it. And it would just be like a little creature that'd fly through the air and just hit him in the head and the guy's like blood would shoot out their head and then their head would explode. Like it was awesome. It would bore into their brain. Like they had always the funnest kind of, uh, items, I guess you could say into all the games. So I'd love to mash that into like any Call of Duty, like just jumping around with just insane weapons that are just, you just can't normally get. You have to like go on like, imagine like Modern Warfare, if you did like a Royale, where if you got all eight pieces of the Chronoscepter

• 47:18Speaker 00

  and then you shot it once, it just exploded like a quarter of the level. Like that'd be fantastic to like, put all these weird kind of things together. That would be, uh, at least what I would think would be a lot of fun.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Casey, do you have any?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  No, I'm, I'm kind of more of a like, the game should be a game that someone conceived of. So mashups don't really, don't really do it for me.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Really? So you're saying Double Dragon Battletoads mashup just didn't do it for you? Because that did it for me, buddy.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  I would.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  No, that's actually pretty pretty sick.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  It definitely didn't. I was never a big, I was never a big fan of like, of like Capcom versus X-Men or like those kinds of things either. I mean, granted they were designed as a whole product, so I'm not saying that that's bad. Just like, I just don't care. I don't care about IPs, uh, in that way usually at all. Like I don't care if Starcraft, just because Starcraft comes out, I'm just going to play it and see if it's any good. I don't care that it's called Starcraft, right? So like, for me, it's usually just like, what is the game? Am I enjoying this game? Um, and so a mashup to me doesn't really, eh, like I'm, you know, I'm like, I don't care. Like skating around in Tony Hawk is either fun or it isn't. I don't care if it's in the Mushroom Kingdom. It, it doesn't add anything for me, right?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  In the kingdom. It's just the kingdom.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Sorry, the kingdom. Right. Sorry.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just the kingdom.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I just don't care enough about that. So it's, I think I'm the wrong target market for a mashup.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Is there a game though, Casey, where you feel like, I love this game, except they didn't do XYZ, where if you could just like wave a magic wand, you'd be like, this game's now top tier for me.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like back, the, the thing that you would want is if back in the day, you could have, uh, taken like PUBG or something and decompiled it and, and, and produced like, you know, the, the version that wasn't so buggy. Like if I could go in and fix.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Remove it. I love that. Just games.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  From the bugs. Sadly, that, that game was client server unfortunately. So you probably couldn't have used this particular technology on it. Uh, because you know, it's, it's running on their servers and you don't have access to the server executable. So.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  But you know.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  I, one really quick side tangent, I want to ask your opinion of anti-cheat situations here. Are we going to see an explosion in people cheating in games? Cause they can just decomp it. They can decomp the whole, like whatever's on the client.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, the protocol could be decomped really quickly.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Um, no, I don't think so, because that already is like, that's just already assumed.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  That's already, they're already working on that anyways. So it's no big.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's already just, it's already just a given that the protocol is, is sniffed always.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  That's just, yeah. So the reason that, that you have these things like kernel anti-cheat is because nobody that I know of anyway, who's doing serious anti-cheat now thinks that you can secure the protocol. Like nobody thinks that. It's like.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Well, but, but nobody like Apex, you know, it took a while for someone to figure out how to like spawn a bunch of themselves. And they figured out how to like actually hack the game through the protocol itself. I would assume that that will become more, uh, like we'll see like maybe a level or a momentary jump in time where it's just that much easier now to know the protocol, know what's available and potentially sniff out.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  No, because like I said, that's not how they're doing anti-cheat anymore. So the thing that, that AI would potentially be a problem for, for anti-cheat is ways of working around their kernel level prevention. Because what it's doing, they are not trying to prevent you from modifying the executable anymore, uh, by making it obscure. They're trying to prevent you by literally preventing you because they have a thing at, running at ring zero that ensures that the executable you're running is the unadulterated executable and that it is talking directly to the Nick. That is how the anti-cheat works now. It does not work by trying to make the protocol be confusing.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Okay. If that makes sense. So that doesn't mean that AI doesn't cause problems for them because you know, people will be using the AI to try to make things that work around the kernel anti-cheat. So they are still going to have attacks from AI, I'm sure. Uh, but it's not probably going to be about the protocol. Cause that part was already, that part already was not much of a, of a gate. If you were relying on the protocol, it would only be a few days before someone would have reversed engineered it before, uh, in the, for the serious people.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Like for the. Is this part of the problem why Linux doesn't have an anti-cheat is that you can just modify the kernel? So theoretically someone could just be like, oh yeah, totally at a kernel level anti-cheat. Kernel now responds always the right way to you, right? Like they could just like, just cheat, cheat around. I, I don't know how they work it precisely, but I, I just assume that you could modify thus the kernel to cheat.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Basically you are correct. Uh, the, the reason that they can do this on Windows is because they are specifically targeting Windows. They know what Windows is. They have specific kernel stuff that is made to, to do what it needs to do. And as far as I know, no one has done that work for Linux yet. I don't really know why. Because you know, you could easily imagine a thing where it's just like, hey, uh, did you, do you want to run Linux and play? And play League of Legends? Well, you download the Riot Linux, which is like a signed kernel binary that has to be installed directly and can't be tampered with and all the, you know, you could, you could do something like that.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  My guess is just because they don't think the market's big enough, because there's, I don't think there's anything stopping this from, from happening. Um, where it's just like, I get, I get, I buy my laptop from Riot and it's just.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Right? It's just, it's pre-installed with Riot Linux. It can't be modified. It's just baked. You gotta, you gotta get a hardware hacker to come in and like, you know.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Honestly, Epic Linux sounds pretty good. I bet it would be good.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Sounds good too.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Ryan, imagine our Linux and it's just, it works perfectly for you all. There's one fuzzy finder for the whole OS and it works perfectly all the way into rad debugger, all the way in. I mean, I would consider buying that, not to play Fortnite, just so that my, I was like, that's perfect. Ryan, get on that. Okay. Or delete your account. Okay.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Ryan Linux, let's do it.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  One or the other.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but you're exactly right, Prime. Like that is, that is why like all, every, basically every game now runs on Linux just fine, except for the ones that are multiplayer and have anti-cheat. And that is because, uh, that, that is a whole nother support thing that they're not doing right now.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  All right.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz I was, I was curious about all these things, especially with Linux, because that always seems to be the one thing that people complain about is that they can't play Valorant.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  That's exactly why.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  I don't know. I'd buy, I, if, if Riot could get me a GPU, that's not $7,000 for a 5090. I think I could be buying myself a Riot laptop, you know what I'm talking about?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  They're not gonna be able to do that. They're not, they can't, they don't have a RAM. Riot does not have a RAM manufacturing arm, Prime.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Okay, well, I would like that. Uh, yeah. Well.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Oh, can I do a mashup? I didn't get to say one. My mashup, since I said the Pokemon one.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  You said the Pokemon, so I thought that was your one.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  No, I'm saying Final Fantasy Tactics and Pokemon. That's the combo that I want.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Oh, that'd be great. I would take that any day of the week. Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  I forgot all about Tactics. Oh, man.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  I'm in the middle of playing it right now.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I still don't understand what the meaning, like Trash said you wanted Pokemon mashed up with Final Fantasy. Like, isn't Pokemon already a clone of Final Fantasy, basically? Like, that's, you go into these little battles and you pick what thing you're gonna do. Like, it feels very Final Fantasy. I haven't played it myself, but.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Casey, having turn-based combat is now just a clone of Final Fantasy. Come on, Casey.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know what I mean? It feels very Final Fantasy already.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like turn-based, yeah. And it's like open world kind of exploration. But I guess like some of the specific Final Fantasy like battle system aspects are like pretty cool, especially in 13.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Honestly, Tactics is really close to Pokemon, because you can like capture new units, you can train them, you can level them up.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  But then you have, you have a whole fleet of Pokemon, you can move them across like an isometric world. They can like specialize in different classes, they could fight each other, there's like, you know. I'm just throwing it out there. That's the mashup that I'd like to see.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  All right, I'll, I'll come up with a mashup just so we have one. Um, Pokemon bowling, cuz you already have a ball. You throw the thing down, and when it hits the pins, the Pokemon like jumps out and does something to the pins that's like based on like what they would normally do. There you go.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  See, Casey, you had it in you this whole time, you dog.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  But it's like, it's like, it's like a fat guy with the like, you know, like a sweaty fat guy who's like got a big old Pokemon ball, right? And he goes like, "Yeah!", when like it does the thing or whatever, yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  We call that the peak male physique.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  I am! Who do you think you are?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that. I want that, but with Pokemon. And like lots of like swearing and things that aren't appropriate for children.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Casey, you say this now. You might have just come up with, uh, a like million, multimillion dollar franchise. So if someone does that from this podcast, you owe Casey a royalty. Just throwing it out there.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Right, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right after you get your Pokemon license from Nintendo, you can pay me that royalty. Sure, that'll happen.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  You're right. On second thought, don't give Casey a royalty. He doesn't wanna have to deal with it.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I'll get sued. I'm now a defendant in pending Nintendo litigation. Uh, and they have the recording of this thing. Delete this episode. Don't air this episode anywhere.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  All right, like, um, just one last thought.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  I'm assuming there's Harry, I'm assuming there's Harry Potter games, and I'm assuming there's a Lord of the Rings game.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  There is like Gollum, right?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  There are, there are.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  I would love to just see like, people from the Harry Potter universe verse people in the Lord of the Rings universe.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Harry Potter universe would win 100% of the time.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  You don't know that.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, cuz Rowl.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Is there a reverse like all the Orichide?

• 57:15Speaker 00

  They would literally write some shitty, like, just retrofitting spell. It's like, "Oh, I just reversed time, then I never saw it again." Like, every problem in the Harry Potter universe could be solved with reversing time. They just used it once.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Trash, you're forgetting about.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Get off first, Harry Potter?

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Come on!

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Trash, you're forgetting, in Harry Potter, they just cast Deuce Ex Machina and win every time they need to.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Yes. It is, it, it just, you'd be retrofitted, like Aragorn and Androl would be coming, swinging in, and they'd just be like, "Expelliaba!", and the sword would just fly away, right? Like, you just couldn't do anything against it.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  I don't know, man, that'd be an epic battle scene.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  You didn't know Harry was born with a special ability that makes him immune to the magic of the angels. Oh, sorry, you've lost.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  The love of his mother prevents Androl from turning him into Wayne.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  On the other hand, I do like the idea of Legolas, because he is an elf, being one of those little tiny things in Harry Potter.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Oh, Legolas as Dobby? Oh, man.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  He has a little bow and arrow that he shoots.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  That would be so much disrespect.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  It's just a rubber, the like rubber, like suction.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  And he's like, "Got you!".

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The House, the House Elves of Rivendell, Rivendell, it's, it's a new, it's a new expansion.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  This is the house that Legolas built.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Oh, great idea, Trash. I love that.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Uh, let's make sure he's adorable and definitely not kill him off midway through. Like, that's all we really need to do with this whole, this series. All right. Well, that was fantastic.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  No, nobody else thinks so, but it's okay.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  About this, I'm, I'm currently seething about this whole Lord of the Rings slash Harry Potter business.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. You're carrying the show, Prime, sorry.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Bye!

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Take it easy, everybody.