N64 recomp devs go to war with AI 'slopcomps'

The people behind N64 recomps are done being polite about AI-made ports. Several outlets ran the same story, and the headlines don’t pull punches. The devs of Banjo-Kazooie Recompiled and Zelda64Recomp are on the record against what Kotaku calls vibe-coded ‘slopcomps’.

The sharpest lines come from the headlines. VGC reports that the Banjo-Kazooie decomp dev calls AI-generated PC ports ‘a race to the bottom’ and ‘disrespectful’. Rock Paper Shotgun says the claim that genAI speeds up these ports is either ‘false’ or ‘missing the point’. A Beetle Adventure Racing decomp dev also pushes back, and a headline quotes him saying ‘It’s Insulting & Hurtful’.

I’m working from headlines and page stubs, not full articles. I can’t tell you which AI-made ports they mean, what they run on, or how they were built. Read the originals before you take a side.

Why should a hobbyist care? Recomps and decomps take real work. Someone has to understand the original code, rebuild it, and keep it honest. If a chatbot can spit out a ‘port’ in a weekend, the line between a real project and a reskinned rip gets blurry fast. That’s the fight here. It’s about credit and respect for the people who did the hard part.

What to watch next: whether the devs name specific AI projects, and whether the argument moves from Twitter threads into the actual release pages. This scene runs on trust, and that’s exactly what’s on the line.