Image: Nintendo
AI is bleeding into practically every aspect of human life these days, from deepfake scams to your favourite emulation handheld being discontinued.
The realm of programming and development is perhaps where the touch of AI is felt most keenly, with AI tools allowing small teams to churn out code far faster. However, there are still questions about whether the code is ‘better’ than what a human could produce, and often, real people have to dig into the code to unpick mistakes AI has made.
All of this, of course, doesn’t even touch on the fact that AI tools are often trained on people’s work without permission or remuneration.
Given that many people in many industries feel threatened by the arrival of AI (and with good reason – it’s layoff season thanks to the new technology), finding that an interesting video game project has leveraged AI is usually enough to put a lot of people off it.
That’s unfortunately what has happened with the new native PC port of Animal Crossing, which has been built on the ac-decomp project.
AI coded slop, no thanks— Chill summer (@ChillSumm) March 17, 2026
the animal crossing decomp uses ai code for the pc port
— aster 🏳️⚧️ (@ahbeef.bsky.social) 2026-03-17T19:42:19.343Z
I really wanted to share the Animal crossing PC port, but seeing that they used ai to help code it… we can’t have anything good.
It’s a real shame that Animal Crossing GCN PC port used generative AI tools. This really killed my interest in ever trying it.
“The game’s original C code runs natively on x86, with a custom translation layer replacing the GameCube’s GX graphics API with OpenGL 3.3,” says the port’s GitHub page.
The page also notes that “AI tools such as Claude were used in this project”, and it’s that disclaimer which has put some people off the whole venture.
A short time ago, the developer behind the Saturn emulator Yaba Sanshiro said that they were using AI to become “more efficient”, and the recent StreetPass successor, ThunderPass, was also built using AI tools.
However, even the slightest hint that a project has relied on AI is enough to poison the well for a growing number of people. Earlier this week, translator Hilltop posted a statement addressing the use of AI in the world of fan-made localisations, saying:
“It does not save time or offer anything of value if every single line needs to be double-checked and re-translated and it reduces the optics of their job to that of ‘text janitor.’ Real translators have been kicked so hard by AI that you should not blame them for not picking up the sloppy seconds of a chatGPT translation patch.”
Do you think it’s possible to maintain this stance in a world where AI is becoming more and more powerful? Should developers distance themselves from using AI in such projects? Let us know with a comment.
[source github.com]
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Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media’s sites from an editorial perspective. He’s also the editor of Time Extension, the network’s newest site, which – paradoxically – is all about gaming’s past glories.