The games that were once shut down by Tencent and NetEase are making a comeback one after another, springing up like mushrooms after rain. Is AI to blame for this?
I believe many of you have come across content matching the title description recently. For example, if you do a quick search on Bilibili, you will find a huge number of videos that use AI to revive discontinued games such as *Double Vision*, *Illusion: A Tale of Phantom Books* and *Leaper Traveler*, many of which even support direct download and trial play — wait a second, we just came back from the National Day holiday, has the gaming industry ushered in a grand era of game revival?
Moreover, the targets of netizens' "grand revival spell" include a large number of discontinued games from major manufacturers such as Tencent, NetEase, Bilibili and Seasun Games. After browsing through all the related content, my first reaction is: Is this workable (and not a criminal offense)?
Coincidentally, not only in China, a number of AI-assisted classic game porting or remastering projects have also emerged overseas recently, including *Halo*, *GTA: Vice City*, the zombie mode of *Call of Duty: Black Ops* and many more, many of which already have a certain level of playability. On October 14, Microsoft also announced the establishment of a dedicated team to explore new opportunities for game decompilation, cross-platform operation and player-participated content creation.
Web version of GTA made by overseas netizens
That's right, even major manufacturers have begun to pay attention to this old game revival trend. The grand era of revival in the gaming industry may really be coming.
01
The Wild Grand Revival Era
The initial sign of this round of grand revival seems to have started on Bilibili.
Since roughly September, a number of UP owners on Bilibili have successively released videos showing their attempts to revive discontinued games with AI. At the beginning, everyone's style was relatively normal, for example, the creators missed the games from the "ancient era" and hoped to be able to play them again.
The first turning point of the event came when the pioneer of 2D gacha games *Million Arthur: Arcana Blood* was targeted. As early as September 9, related AI revival videos appeared on Bilibili, and later some netizens shared more than ten hours of actual gameplay footage to prove that the game is really playable now... While netizens in the comment section were shocked, they also realized: Can other discontinued 2D gacha games also be revived?
As a result, a large wave of revival projects dominated by 2D gacha games such as *Ark Order*, *Aurora Legend*, *Witch's Weapon*, *Dengeki Bunko: Crossing Void*, *A Certain Magical Index*, *Cos Battle* and *Crimson Witch* have emerged. Judging only by the number of videos, you may not think there are many, but when you scroll to the comment section, you will find you have stumbled into a whole nest of necromancers: many netizens have posted screenshots of the revival of other games.
In the second stage, the style of netizens became even more absurd. In addition to expressing shock and asking for installation packages, more people began to treat UP owners as wishing wells, hoping that they could help revive their favorite games, and even willing to pay for it.
Some people even made a wish to the wrong object, and the Chatbot returned a user manual to them.
What's even more absurd is that some players have turned their targets to games that are still in operation. I once saw two almost identical sets of questions and answers in the same comment section: someone asked if it was possible to modify an online game, the UP owner replied that there was legal risk, and a third person said "then why do private servers exist?" Dude, your idea is a little bit illegal.
There are even players who have posted suspected self-modified gameplay screenshots of *Honkai Impact 3rd* and *Honor of Kings*, trying to challenge the two largest legal departments of domestic game companies on their own. A revival zone UP owner also said that someone had asked him if *Delta Action* could be revived...
Later on, some comments have evolved into an indescribable stage. For example, some people made a wish to revive QVOD:
A netizen named "Bruce Wayne" also came to discuss how to revive the dead — seemingly making a dark joke about Batman losing his parents.
02
Is This Revival Workable (and Not a Criminal Offense)?
After looking through the superficial phenomena and interesting stories, I believe everyone, like me, wants to know: Why can discontinued games be revived so easily? How can they be so reckless?
After looking through several 2D gacha game cases, I found some answers.
First of all, these revival projects do not let AI create an old game from scratch. Most of the cases shown so far can find the original client installation package, and some even have official single-player versions, private servers run by the community and other reference versions. The materials and ready-made achievements that developers can directly use are far more abundant than imagined, and the threshold is much lower.
Many UP owners in the revival zone also introduced their implementation methods and difficulties in the comment section. For example, if there are original materials in the client game, you can try to decompile it with AI. You don't need to know programming yourself, as long as the AI knows it; on the contrary, if most of the content of a game is stored in the cloud, even the smartest AI can't do anything without raw materials.