微软宣布成立 Xbox Labs 探索生成式AI vibecoded 游戏混编、Mod与移植

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has announced the founding of Xbox Labs, a small team that is dedicated to exploring how generative AI is being used to decompile games, port them, mash them up and mod them.

She also completely avoids mentioning that it’s AI that is being used for this.

Sharma writes, “In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. […] Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.”

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has been tasked with leading this team, with the promise that they will develop it “in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.”

She gets closest to acknowledging that this is all AI translations and a lot of vibecoding in the following paragraph:

“I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We’ve spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.”

Let’s be clear, AI has rapidly become exceptional at handling these tasks. In recent years we’ve seen projects like the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team, which spent 21 months reverse engineering the executable for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and making it into human-readable code once more, thus enabling source ports to other platforms, such as Ship of Harkinian. That it was reverse engineered and decompiled was vital for ensuring the project’s legality.

However, the last year has seen an explosion of these projects, using gen-AI to handle the decompilation process – and let’s be clear, gen-AI is very, very good at this kind of task. We’ve also seen massive progress in a full-blown PS5 emulator, mashups that threw Mario platforming into Elden Ring, skateboarding into Modern Warfare 2, and more – this actually works by artificially overlaying one game onto another. Then (while I do not believe it’s been reliant on gen-AI) there’s Halo 3: Reclaimer, which has modded the classic FPS to support 128-player multiplayer. Given how badly Xbox has fumbled Halo projects in the past decade, that last one has to sting a little.

All of this shows what’s now possible with every billionaire’s favourite technological boondoggle, and some admittedly clever ways to apply it. Some of it’s pure drivel, though, and has much of that paper-thin veneer that AI can easily apply without actual intent being applied.

Source: Xbox