What reverse engineering and modernising an old war game tells us about the economic impact of the transformer

Some observations from my War of the Lance (1989) Code Harness assisted modernisation (WIP)

I gave Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next a job: Reverse engineer and Port War Of The Lance (1989) to modern browsers. It took about a week, primarily because I can only run a single lane on my workstation due to VRAM constraints, but it got the job done: Faithful reproduction of rendering and game rules in a new Three.js rendering engine.

A few days ago I started modernising it into a Total War meets Heroes of Might and Magic like experience that you could actually play without getting a UX aneurysm. But doing so while keeping the original “underneath”.

After a few hours, it looked like this (see also the video in the attached LinkedIn post).

In the past, one would have chosen another AAA game for a “total conversion”, but in this new transformer world, synthesising the exact features and renderer is easier and faster.

It's not just code

With the Fable 5.1 just released, there was an opportunity to see how the frontier improved on modelling with Blender and it's pretty good and definitely a significant step up from Opus 5, quite usable in fact for this type of game.

The workflow here is to have the model write python code that leverages Blender's headless mode APIs to create web-usable GLBs. It's fast and token efficient, you can model about 80-100 models on a week's worth of Fable subscription.

That's not good enough for most use cases, but let's not kid ourselves, the specialized models will get there.

Want to add seasons, day/night and three moon phases? Well, that'd be 15 minutes and $2.28

Instant, usable 3D assets, placeholder or not, “unbounds” design - you can now order custom assets for anything you want as a token micro-transaction, only limited by renderer considerations.

It'll be interesting to see how AI really changes modding now that every game is becoming moddable given the powerful reverse engineering capabilities available.

The trend line is brutal

What matters in the end here is the trajectory:

A local model equivalent to a frontier model from April or May can reverse engineer and port a game like this in a week on a business workstation.

If given access to cloud APIs to dispatch worker lanes, that drops to 2 days.

A September 2026 frontier model can do it in a few hours with ever shrinking human intervention and that time will shrink to minutes in the coming 18-36 months.

Try a speed optimised model like gpt-5.3-codex-spark or a Cerebras-accelerated model and you get the idea.

Custom models for every city? We're not competing with GTA, so we're no longer asset budget, just renderer bound and /auto research does the job....

All of this - the complex task of reverse engineering, renderer optimisation and then building something new on top on one of the most fickle platforms of all, browser based web - involved a single person with a full time job and less than 4 hours of dedicated attention to the harness over a week.

🤖 It's no longer the job it used to be

The human is a “bot herder” now whose role is to provide intent, taste and occasional critical validation.

Knowing what you want or, in the absence of that, knowing what to choose from infinite options generate for you.

I never touched an IDE, Blender, RE tool, commandline, source control in this browser. I don’t know how the code looks like but I know it meets the linting and code quality requirements enforced by the harness on every run, frozen in stone by the tests created on the way.

Not even QA is untouched:

The harness can play, in a matrix kind of way, the old game in DOSBox-X, staring at memory dumps and disassembly like Neo to divine what is, and play its own creation via Playwright, inspecting DOM and memory as well as using multimodal vision to perform visual analysis ... all while writing tests that prevent backsliding or regression.

Screenshots and occasional videos from auto play testing pushed automatically to "jumpgate" a context sharing app I created to be able to manage asynchronous work, allowing me to watch progress and provide comments for improvements. Not different work from being a Lead Designer back at Bioware, except i100x faster.

Reverse engineering is a great example because it essentially is deep copying from artefacts that were considered safe to distribute.

With Copyright and IP roadkill to AI models in most economies, that's a problem.

But does it generalise?

One may be tempted to say "reverse engineering and porting is not the same as creating", and that'd be true, but it misses the point:

The act of reverse engineering and porting decades old games to modern environments requires a complex, deeply involved set of tasks from multiple disciplines. In the past, the required combination of skills was exceedingly rare to find, maybe a few thousand in the 320,000 people strong professional industry workforce and it used to take months, if not years to do a single game.

It's the quintessential deep, skilled knowledge labor profile out there that people understood as a career protected by depth of skill and knowledge acquisition.

No More. The transformer and the associated destruction of intellectual property protections end this, commoditising knowledge that took decades to learn in seconds, turning the previous knowledge sharing economy on the internet against its contributors and creators.

This prompt made a somewhat working port of Dragonstrike (1990, DOS) in 8 hours with Fable 5.1. It was unfinished and had blind spots, but about 85% without any human interaction.

Another point here, speaking as an industry veteran, is that the boundaries are fluid. Creative work like games always transformed work from different domains, and only a small share of it is truly new in most games.

Transformation, the transformer's special trick, cuts like a knife into the idea that creativity is special once you understand that people perceive ideas novel to them as creative and the transformer holds every published idea ever in its bowels. Enough to saturate every human with endless "new ideas" forever.

Here we have an old retro game that transformed the books and stories by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and the intellectual property of Gary Gygax and TSR, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, fusing it with the war gaming ideas and concepts developed by SSI into a unique experience.

Krynn: Total War Of The Lance, franken-amalgamation of tokens from lifetimes of game history.

The transformer takes it, on human command, and fuses it with the concepts and ideas of Creative Assembly (Total War), the work of people on the WebGL and WebGPU SIG at W3C and the "taste and decisions" of the human behind the LLM and produces the infinite results a creative can hone and iterate on.

The Transformer solves the knowledge economy

Contrary to the noise and smokescreen about AGI the techbros are deploying to collect more and more rounds of investments, the transformer does not solve human intelligence. Not even close. But it does "solve" a fundamental aspect of our economic system, with absolutely devastating long term effect.

The knowledge economy is structured around the problem of diffusing and applying knowledge into the economy. We do this through education (bootstrap) and continuous learning.

Human brains are the storage medium and application device for the knowledge in this economy and the difficulty of acquiring knowledge and its reliable application are the price-making mechanism.

A medical doctor having to spend 15 years to acquire the knowledge is price and paid better than the grocery store manager primarily due to the difference in knowledge acquisition.

The transformer competes here as a medium and partial applicator, with economies of scale and centralisation creating economics neither human nor smaller players can compete with in our current economic system.

As human and horse found out during industrialisation, you can't outrun an internal combustion engine, it's likely humans won't be able to out-memorise and out-apply a transformer for the Pareto 80% of cases in the long run, especially if quality enforcing regulation is gutted.

Reliability concerns (but it hallucinates!), Copyright and Legal Responsibility would offer friction against a quick victory march here, but as we all can see every day, the battle over regulation, the ultimate arbiter of what reliability is required in society and copyright is being fought with more money than ever assembled in the history of mankind.

That screenshot of the four seasons up there? It was a prompt

Scarce evidence exists that copyright or stringent regulation on quality would succeed in stopping it in the current political environment in the US. Meta walking away with a slap on the wrist while managing to entrench their age-verification regulatory capture at the same time should disabuse anyone of the idea this has a happy ending where old rules prevail.

But there will be new jobs...

Probably, but we have a problem here: We have a technology that given enough data about a job can abstract the rules and replace the creator in the process. And we have economic incentives that guarantee that if the job is valuable, someone will fund the model to attack it.

It's important here to not fall for the techbro hype: This process will take time, a decade, maybe more, because most jobs are vastly more complex than advertised and the economics of optimising highly optimised systems are not in favour of new, unreliable frontier technology.

Old UIs are perfectly serviceable, why change?

But systems thinking helps us to understand where the incentives are pointing and, fused with the fact that software acts as "machines for the knowledge economy" (in the industrialisation sense of the word) and that making software is getting extremely commoditised as we speak, we can absolutely predict that the impact here is going to be biblical:

It's digital transformation on steroids while the underlying system of rules and IP laws, trade and treaties crumbles.

IP or Transformer, choose one!

You can't have an IP based economy and pervasive AI use everyone defines as the future with current laws, because the transformer launders and strips copyright and copying beats creating every time.

The advantage new creators had in the past was that their work could go "viral" and find a market before the competition could react. That time is over, the transformer guarantees it with brutal economics:

Whatever you spend designing, researching and testing to make a great product, your competition will spend on marketing instead, having reverse engineered your product for pennies.

🌊 The Coming Storm for the Game Industry

The game industry (and other knowledge sectors shortly thereafter) are staring at a commoditisation tsunami of change unlike anything that ever happened.

The water has already receded but people are fighting on the beaches about whether it's really gone, whether it is just cyclical and will just peacefully come back or that the pristine cities built by professional developers will weather the storm because “quality”.

It is clear to me that every single job profile in the industry will change, with many not surviving the transition.

"Let's prototype a Total War Style UI Chrome, but with X,Y,Z", we're just splicing genes, or tokens and it takes minutes to see the result. The Maelstrom in the Blood Sea of Ishtar after the Cataclysm feels like an oddly fitting image here..

Everyone with a career stake in this industry (and others) needs to very quickly start thinking about what “higher ground” means, but as far as I can tell, there may not be any truly safe ground.

Societal and corporate inertia may protect other industries a while longer, but gaming has always been a frontier business.

Is it Rockstar's continent sized shiny brand fortress, defended by a giant moat of money and sheer scope?

Is it building an ark for your community?

There's always exceptions, we all know this, but realistically, what are the prospects for the pareto 80% of the industry? Not well during the flood, but who knows what comes behind it.

Where are the winners?

While it may be tempting to get hyped up about being able to build so much more so much faster, we cannot ignore that these capabilities are available to everyone, that there's precious little moat, especially if IP doesn't survive the slaughter.

How will this end?

Ask journalists. Their moat was publishing and access to information and Big Tech gleefully handed that to everyone, showing us in the process that professional, expensive quality is not nearly the moat people think it is. As if Roblox and Minecraft didn't teach us that already.

Commoditize your complements this strategy is called and it ensures the real winners will be the attention platforms run by large technology companies.

The easier it is to create content the more content is created. The more content is created, the more competition for attention. The more competition for attention, the higher the ad auction prices to reach eyeballs - leaving everyone but the platform fight to the margins.

How commoditised?

Here's a mobile merge game I made as an experiment targeting mobile IOS on iPhone 17 that was made autonomously by gpt-5.6-sol in 11 hours, including assets

Play It

I'm not sure anyone would play it if they knew there's only tokens, no soul, but the ad pushing it to them and drowning out your handcrafted game won't mention any of that and the time where AISlop is easily recognisable is very quickly going to come to an end.

And having spent less than a McDonalds Happy Meal on "making" the game, I have plenty of cash on hand to pay for featuring. Cash you spent on designing, testing, producing assets and more.

And if you actually stumble onto something interesting and fun...

That's really bleak

Yes, but it's just mapping incentives and a bit of system thinking. The transformer will smash our economic system and cause massive redistribution, by default to the techbros, because they got all our knowledge and economies of scale.

There's, even in the bleakest times, opportunity for smart people. But it's not useful to pretend that's a plan for the majority of people working in the industry right now. Or any affected industry.

On the positive side, we can now make games as political commentary over a weekend targeting that one viral trend that's happening right now. I don't know how to feel about that though...

"Command & Profit: Hormuz Strait" - A game I vibed together after watching yet another ridiculous report from the Gulf. Try the Hormuz Hazard scenario, it's the only one that works. Play It Here

About the Author

Georg Zoeller is an industry veteran and troublemaker with more than 25 years of experience across games and frontier technology, including AI.

He contributed to many beloved PC and console games at companies like BioWare, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft and lead game industry aligned teams at Facebook/Meta working on products such as Game Streaming, Canvas, GameRoom, Instant Games, Gaming Video and Games Platforms solutions for many years.

He's provided AI strategy and technology disruption consulting to AAA studios, publishers and some indy companies over the last few year.

Technology stack

omp harness
Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next (256k, Multi Modal, on an RTX 6000 Blackwell MQ workstation): Reverse Engineering and coding
Claude Fable 5.1: 3d Models, Reviews
GPT-Codex-Spark: Mass high speed code transformations (AI slop gate)
DOSBox-X, Radare2, open box as reverse engineering framework
Blender headless: Deterministic modelling.
All Skill synthesised out of the model weights themselves.

Georg's Blog