AI-assisted development is bringing old games to platforms we'd never have thought possible. That's exciting, but the growing flood of unfinished ports is beginning to raise an uncomfortable question: how many of these games are actually worth playing?
How many of the games were worth playing on the original platform?
This is a form of preservation. Let people enjoy things.
The problem isn’t the good ports, it’s the broken vibe coded ports that are a worse experience than an emulator.
Most of them end up using a hacked up emulator in their backend. So they push out the original reverse engineers who made them even possible.
Storing a childs’ tracing of the mona lisa in a vault is a form of preservation, doesn’t make it useful outside of very specific contexts.
That’s hyperbole of course, but slop conversions are a facsimile of greatly varying quality.
The effort it took to port a game used to guarantee that any game someone took the time and care to port would be a great game. That filter’s gone now, but even bad games should be of interest to historians.
ET has a great historical value. OK, at least a funny story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)
ET: Exactly how Bad Was It? An Analysis.