Yes this isn't clean-room. Though none of these decompilation projects have been resolved in court yet. re3 (GTA3/Vice City decompilation) developers were sued by Take Two but they settled out of court.

There's openrw which doesn't use re3 code.

Clean room needs an independent second party with their own intent. An AI rewrite probably doesn't qualify, since its output traces directly to what it read.

Just need two AI for a second party.

That also was exposed to proprietary assets or binaries at some point during training

I don't think that counts.

I really doubt that any AI model was ever exposed to the original Space Cadet Pinball game.

Maybe it was edited, but from what I see, in the last sentence they said to have Claude make a spec, not to rewrite the code.

It's crazy that license laundering is still the primary use case for LLMs.

With game modding or decompilation, a lot of people do stuff that's probably illegal but whoever owns the rights doesn't care so they do it anyway. Microsoft is fairly hands off with old stuff like this that doesn't do any material damage to their bottom line. For a more serious example, the full leaked source code to Windows NT 4 and XP has been on Microsoft-owned Github for ages and they haven't bothered taking it down, probably because those versions have been out of support for over 10 years at this point.

You can see on this thread that the original developers of Space Cadet Pinball think this is a neat project so I don't see anything morally wrong either.

I didn't even think about the fact that its STILL on GitHub and they never did a takedown request even before it was on GitHub. It's such old Windows related code, part of it does not surprise me.