There was always loyal community around “old” games, this has nothing to do with AI. It’s the modern, shallow, money-first game development approach that pushes people. AI is a godsend that allows to cheaply modify the games.

Until now was impossible to bring a win xp game to browser in a week by an average dev. Show me otherwise.

and that's something desperately needed?

Yes. When you have 15 minutes to play, you just want to open the website and play, no figure out where to torrent things or which emulator works where and fiddling with the settings, etc.

Not as easy for graphically demanding games, but web browsers have been able to run a full VM in a browser for years now. Slap the game on it and call it a day: https://retroonline.net/Windows/Pharaoh%20%26%20Cleopatra

Now, please vibecode me a winxp directx driver that serializes calls to its wasm counterpart, to enable graphics acceleration for such VMs. Sounds highly doable: virgl, virtio-gpu and Venus exist. Might be even simpler to do it for Vulkan and port dxvk to XP.

The communities playing old games did not need or want versions playable in the browser, they're already playing the games on emulators, source ports, or with community patches for modern systems.

It was possible, devs were just sleeping on WASM. What the LLMs are doing with this shit is trivial that you literally could do in a week the first time while learning, and then a day after you have the toolchain set up. Literally all of the hard work is already done for you/the LLM by the people who implemented C-to-WASM compilation.

AI has made it much easier to execute on an idea, but someone had to come up with the idea first.

Isn't it ironic that AI goes through such incredible breakthroughs just as the time were society seems so creatively bankrupt with endless movie/game reboots/remakes :)