I wouldn't be too sure about that. The original decompilations of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were done mostly by hand because LLMs weren't really around yet, but these kinds of projects seem perfectly suited for handing the gritty work off to AI: There is a clear output (exact binary recreation) and a straightforward path to get there (look at this assembly code and produce some C code from it). The decompilation of Twilight Princess jumped from very little to basically 100% of core code in the past year alone: https://github.com/zeldaret/tp

I have no doubt that this would be possible for MGS2 as well.

That's pre-2026 thinking. At this point, with the ability to lash IDA or similar tools to an agentic harness, there is no longer any such thing as a closed-source binary.

Absolutely. This is just some delusions of a vibe coder at best. Not with just current generation of AI tools but essentially never. The conversion from C, C++, Rust or whatever, through post-processing (macros etc), through IR generation, through compile time optimizations, through link time optimizations, to the generated machine code is a one way street for low level languages. You can get a pretty close higher level approximation that matches the flow/logic/structure - but the code will never be anywhere near close to the original source code. I could write the same C++ program in 3 different ways and get identical assembly, how do you go back to the exact source? The answer is that you don't.

Here's the same simple program, written in 3 different ways, producing identical binary compatible code: https://godbolt.org/z/qWrc8fEnn

How does the AI know whether it should produce back the snippet #1, #2 or #3? It does not. It cannot.

>Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

Did you try the above links? I haven’t shared the full source but all game mechanics listed in the ja3 guide including code snippets where helpful.

> It’s the real code there is code for known removed content (tanker escape scene and the 9/11 removed cutscene). Also AI can’t do what you’re theorizing yet.

There are lots of decompilation community efforts for N64 games, etc.

Someone should train a model on this. Giving the decompiled symbols good names, etc.

De-minification and de-obfuscation while we're at it.

It should be easy to generate a ton of "synthetic" (actually real) training data for this by simply compiling sources and using that as (input, output) pairs.

It’s playable but nowhere near as good and a lot of criticism is warranted. A true ‘70%’ game.

Gunplay is weak. Accuracy drops off waaaay too fast based on maximum range of the gun and burst fire has arbitrary damage reduction per bullet. So short range guns almost always missed (mechanics documented from source in the above guide) and if they hit they did little damage. It means the only viable weapons are long range weapons. Rifles and assault rifles. A submachine gun is worse than a sniper rifle even at close range.

The plot has a key gameplay changing moment that triggers waaay to early meaning you have to work to see much of the game content. Everyone tries to avoid the trigger on the second playthrough which is a silly thing to do game design wise. A desire to teleport across the map was the original motivation to the above from my point of view.

Enemies are bullet sponges in the late game too. A lame way o balance weak ai and gunplay.

It could have been as good as ja2 but they just didn’t refine the above enough.

Raw assets are probably the better tell

I’m sure the builds from doing what i’ve been doing won’t generate identical bytecode but it’s fun for the sake of messing with the game or understanding it (eg. The checksum logic for newstowers save game logic was cooy pastable as was the whole save game structure formatting itself and clearly matches the game - it works!). Likewise with all the JA3 mechanics documented in that linked guide.