To reverse-engineer a game, you need dozens of different tools, analyze the game's executable, run it, inspect which files it reads, which calls it makes to the operating system, what memory it allocates, and so on and so forth. This is exceedingly tedious, and yet can't be done half-heartedly: one errant byte is a bug. It's like undoing a machine with a million cogs and keeping track exactly where each one was, its size, and orientation. Modern games grew, too, and can have millions of lines of code.
But that kind of nitpicky, repetitive work is just what computers excel at — even non-deterministic ones like LLMs. 2026's AI models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude 5.5 families are "smarter" in the sense that they follow complicated instructions more closely and can better keep track of their tasks, granting them a higher degree of autonomy. The high token efficiency of lower-grade variants like Claude Sonnet also makes them somewhat affordable, if not cheap, to use on a humongous project like taking apart an entire game.
Given how AI bots can hallucinate and make up strange replies and code, you may wonder how a project of this scale ever gets accomplished. It's simple: your agent hands you decompiled source code, and it compiles it again to see if it matches the original byte-for-byte. Even if they hallucinate, the bots can try over and over until they get it right, and developers can correct them if needed.
Reverse-engineering needs multiple tools, all with their own technical terms and idiosyncrasies. Whereas before developers had to wrangle them across terminal windows, now you can get your agent to twiddle bits and talk between programs on your behalf, so long as you issue the right orders. They don't have to stop for breaks, either.
With relatively simple prompts, you can poke around and break down a game or application — provided you have one of the pricier agent subscriptions, or can absorb high token bills, as for example the Modern Warfare 2 decomp took three months and up to 700 billion tokens to accomplish. Had its developer used REA, he may have cut down on time and tokens both.
Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/why-native-pc-ports-of-console-games-are-suddenly-everywhere-reverse-engineer-anything-gives-ai-agents-a-unified-toolkit-and-byte-for-byte-checks-keep-hallucinations-in-line#main
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