---
title: "REA and what it maybe might mean for games"
date: 2026-10-18T00:46:36.000Z
---

I think the last couple of weeks have been a big shift in games. I don't think I can be accused of not paying attention -- we've changed gear.

Here's my best guess at where the bouncing ball is going: games become platforms and mods become the dominant expectation from players. Platforms as we know them are simply a starting point, and the incremental effort to be anywhere is collapsing to near zero. The question that keeps bouncing between my ears is: what does this mean for platforms that currently exist, and what should incumbents do to not be left behind?

No guarantee the below projects are all from the last couple weeks, but I have become aware of them over the last couple of weeks...

- Escape from Skyrim (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim): This mod decompiles and ports Escape from Tarkov's ballistic physics and grid-inventory logic directly into Skyrim's engine to replace medieval looting with hardcore tactical gear management.
- Spider-Man in Gotham (Batman: Arkham City): Modders extracted web-swinging animation trees from Insomniac's Spider-Man titles and mapped them onto Batman's movement model for fluid web-traversal across Arkham.
- Minecraft in Lands Between (Elden Ring): Over 1,600 block models, mob routines, and sounds were extracted from Minecraft and injected into FromSoftware's engine, letting Creepers roam Elden Ring with full physics damage.
- Native GTA V iOS Port: Developers decompiled x86 instructions from GTA V into ARM64-compatible binaries, running GTA V natively on iPhones without cloud streaming or emulation wrappers.
- Fable 2 Native PC Recompilation: This project reconstructed Xbox 360 binary execution flows to generate native x86 Windows assembly, bringing the console-exclusive RPG to PCs natively after two decades.
- Sonic in Los Santos (Grand Theft Auto V): Modders extracted Sonic's momentum physics, spin-dash routines, and high-speed animations to create a fully playable Sonic with native momentum-based physics across Los Santos.
- Skate Movement System in Modern Warfare 2: This mod extracts physics and trick calculations from EA's Skate series and maps them onto MW2's player controller so players can perform kickflips off containers on Rust during gunfights.
- Super Smash Bros. Melee Match Logic in Bevy/Rust: The GameCube binary's hitboxes and collision mechanics were extracted and rebuilt inside the open-source Rust Bevy engine for frame-accurate Melee physics without Dolphin emulation.
- Native PS5 Shader Relinking on Windows (AnyPS5): This translation layer maps 1,166 custom PS5 shader instructions into standard DirectX 12 and Vulkan pipelines to render PS5 executables natively on desktop GPUs.
- Playable 2009 Call of Duty Reconstruction: A fleet of AI agents continuously parsed a 2009 CoD executable using automated hex checks until producing matching source code for a playable native PC build.
- Automated Server Emulator for Dead MMOs: An agent pipeline intercepts network traffic to reverse-engineer encrypted client-server RPC calls for shut-down multiplayer games, automatically generating working local server emulators in days.