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 (1998) 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 threeJS rendering engine.

A few days ago I started modernising it into a Total War meets Heroes Might and Magic like experience that you could actually play without getting a UX aneurism. 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 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 absence of that, knowing what to choose from infinite options generate for you.

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 it’s 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.

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 complex, deeply involved set of task 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 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 ends this, commoditising knowledge that took decades to learn in seconds, turning the previous knowledge sharing economy on the internet against it's contributors and creators.

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 it's 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 Weiss and Tracy Hickman and the intellectual property of Gary Gygax and TSR, Advanced dungeons and 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 home and iterate on.

The Transformer solves the knowledge economy

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.

Reliability concerns (but it hallucinates!) and Legal concerns (You can't just take this IP and remix it) would offer friction against a quick victory march here, but as well can all 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.

Scarce evidence exists that copyright or stringent regulation on quality would succeed to stop 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.

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 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 use 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 cents.

🌊 The Coming Storm

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.

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

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

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

Is it building an ark for your community?

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.

On the positive side, we can anow 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

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