It now only takes 8 hours to revive an old game.

If you have been scrolling through videos frequently recently, it is not hard to notice a phenomenon: a large number of online PC games and mobile games that have accompanied you through countless nights in your childhood and youth, but were finally shut down, such as QQ Tang, Call of Duty OL, Monster Chronicles, Girls' Coffee Gun, and Million Arthur, have successfully won their comeback matches.

It is not the official game operators that revived them, but some little-known small content creators who even only have hundreds or thousands of fans.

Reviving old games is not a new topic, but reviving a batch of online games in a way that they can support online multiplayer battles after revival is really quite astonishing.

It is acceptable that masters hide among the public, but are there too many folk masters...?

The reason why the author raises the question is that reviving old games sounds like repackaging old wine in a new bottle that can be done easily, but in fact, this work is extremely laborious and is totally a tough task done purely out of passion without any payment.

Some people who have tried to revive old games by themselves should know that if you do it poorly, you will waste years of time for nothing; even if you do it well, you can't make any money, and you are very likely to receive a lawyer's letter, and you may not even know what you are doing it for.

How huge is the workload of manually reviving old games?

There is a perfect example recently. Back in 2020, a group of people created a group, aiming to turn the old version of Gameloft's *Asphalt 8: Airborne*, the memory of a generation, into a standalone game.

This work lasted for more than 6 years. 6 years, my friends, a student in the sixth grade back then has now been a college freshman.

Until October 3 a while ago, a relatively complete version was finally finished and released to the public.

Why is it so troublesome?

Because what they made is not a cracked version, but a version that optimizes all systems based on the standalone mode.

For example, the token system related to in-game purchases in the game has been transformed into a point system that has nothing to do with payment; in terms of competition rules, a new classic single-player mode has been added; the game adds a custom matching function, where after players enter their rank points, the system will automatically generate AI players with similar ranks to simulate the original PVP mode...

If we say that half of the team's energy was spent on optimizing the game's own systems, the other half was spent on figuring out how to make it compatible with current devices and systems.

Now our software and hardware are countless times more powerful than before, but many old games still cannot run.

Take the female gunner version and male ghost swordsman version of *Dungeon & Fighter* from ten years ago as an example. You spend a lot of effort downloading the installation package, but it crashes directly as soon as you open it. Many ordinary players who want to relive the old games can only buy old devices on the second-hand market.

Those senior game enthusiasts spent 6 years manually making a standalone version using game resources. With this contrast, you can feel how abnormal this great game revival era is.

Question: Guess how long it took those batch-revived online and mobile games to be finished?

Let's reveal the answer directly: if it's fast, it takes less than half a day, only a few hours. During these few hours, you don't even need to write a single line of code, you just need to send commands and act as a keyboard commander.

Some people may have guessed that the foundation of the great game revival era is the magic power of AI.

A Bilibili UP creator named "The Wind is Very Noisy Today" only has 103 followers, and he only posted one video, which is about reviving Com2us's *Sky Battle World* with AI.

The revival process is not complicated at all, it even makes people feel that they can do it too, which is so playful that it is almost unbelievable.

To make it short: the whole process took 7 hours and 53 minutes, consumed about 1.08 billion tokens, and only sent 52 messages to AI.

Let alone you, I even doubt that this guy is making up the numbers — 52 messages? Come on, sometimes when I look up materials for writing articles, I casually send more than 52 messages to AI.

1.08 billion tokens looks quite intimidating to laymen, but for developers, it is really not a large amount.

Converted into money, 1 billion tokens can cost thousands, tens of thousands or even more expensively, and there are really cheap options. A while ago, there was a news that a deputy director made a mini-program with 1 billion tokens, and he only spent 20 RMB, which is cheaper than my phone bill.

The revival process of *Sky Battle World* is not complicated to explain.

The UP creator first used AI to find the installation package of the game, but since the server has been shut down for a long time, the installation package is basically equivalent to an empty shell, and the assets that support the operation of the game, such as characters, levels and values, are all missing.

Normally, you can't go any further at this step, even AI can't make bricks without straw, and there's nothing you can do.

But reality has proved countless times that the world is a slipshod makeshift structure. The UP creator patted his head and told AI that the resources might be on the CDN, and AI really found the resources successfully...

Simply put, the game used CDN, which refers to the server closest to players, to transmit information before, but after the server was shut down, the resources on these servers were not deleted, and everyone can get them for free. Is this the Internet sharing spirit? It's so touching.

Then he asked AI to match the resources one by one. For some missing values, AI even retrieved the players' strategy guides from that year to fill in the gaps. Finally, AI tested it and found that the game can run normally, then output the final version.

As for the UP creator himself, he typed a few lines of words, slept for a night, and he could play the game when he woke up at dawn.

Yes friends, this matter is so simple, you can really do it if you try.

We can no longer trace who kicked off the curtain of the great revival era, but on the Internet, people seem to unanimously start looking for the game installation packages that carry their youthful memories, and shout to the computer "Revive, my love".

As a result, we can play the originator of all current 2D mobile games, *Million Arthur*, which was released in 2012 and shut down in the Chinese server in 2018. It even has a PC version, bringing an experience that even the older generation of players have never enjoyed before.

We can also play *Girls' Frontline*, the regret of countless people that was once forced to shut down in 2024 after 8 years of operation.

In addition, a large number of games such as *Destiny Child*, *Merc Storia*, *Ar tonelico II*, *Aurora Legend*, and *Never 7: The End of Infinity* have been dug out from some forgotten corners and officially revived.

Every time people find that the game they were once obsessed with has been revived, they were about to say goodbye to it permanently a second ago, and then they are so excited that they jump up from the bed, and their happiness overflows the screen.

People with strong hands-on ability can cooperate with AI to make their favorite version.

People with weak hands-on ability can just make a wish in the comment area.

As the momentum of the great revival era grows stronger, people's standards for "revival" are getting higher and higher.

At the very beginning, people thought that as long as the game can run and they can play normally, it is enough.

Later, many people have started to build various online systems for games that originally had network functions.

For example, a small UP creator with a thousand followers revived QQ Tang, using 5 billion tokens to restore most of the functions, and also made adaptations for local, LAN and network multiplayer modes, compatible with Windows 10 and 11.

This vibrant and thriving scene makes you can't help but sigh that technology shapes a better life, right?

Well, don't be happy too early. The great revival era is very powerful, but it is also very illegal.

With the revival of countless games, some people have thought that since we can revive past games, does it mean that we can also make local versions of games that are still in operation now?

This bold idea was quickly stopped by the creator circle, after all, no one wants to get into legal trouble.

Players just want to enjoy simple happiness in their own small circle, but scalpers don't care about any of these rules.

On various platforms, people who resell revived version of games for profit have long been everywhere.

You spend billions of tokens and stay up several nights to make the game for playing with friends who share the same hobby, but it is taken away immediately and sold for 2.88 yuan elsewhere.

It is hard to say how many copies have been sold. The main problem is that it is disgusting, disgusting to you, and also disgusting to game manufacturers.