> I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.

Maybe making nostalgic experiences available so cheaply is not a good thing. For me seeing mods and reimaginings of old games is interesting because people puts lots of effort into them with attention to detail and their own ideas. Someone recreating Half-Life 1 with modern graphics using AI is not going to create something as cool as Black Mesa, for instance, which didn't attempt to make a 1 to 1 recreation but to improve things and make it fit with more modern graphics.

LLMs can also greatly streamline this process as well. For a silly gameplay example, if you wanted to enable double jumping in Quake you could do it in a few minutes and a single prompt instead of what would have previously been the start of a pretty significant dive into the code.

Basically I think what we're seeing is that LLMs make everything easy, and so the standard for success is going to increase somewhat significantly simply because there are no longer any barriers whatsoever to doing things.