I remade a 1990s god game in under two days of calendar time by directing AI coding agents

Seven hours to first play, under two days to the full game

I remade Baldies, a 1990s god game about breeding a settlement of bald workers and outwitting the Hairies. I did it by directing AI coding agents, without the source code. The full original campaign plays again, read at runtime from my own copy of the game. That shows one person can now rebuild software, games included, from the outside.

When software can be rebuilt from the outside, we have to think of software differently. There are downsides, but there are a lot of upsides people are missing.

The knowledge great designers put into old programs can be captured, kept in a reusable form, recombined and poured into new forms. I call that fluid software. The original pixel art is part of what is worth keeping.

How it was rebuilt

• The first playable version came out of one seven-hour session on October 8, 2026. From the first file (October 7, 11:19) to the full remake (October 9, 10:40) took under two days of calendar time, while I worked on other projects.
• There was no source code to start from, and the game's logic was not decompiled. The engine is new Python code, written from the outside.
• It still reads the original game. The agents worked out the level, art and palette file formats, and used a disassembler only to find a few data tables, such as house sizes, in the original program.
• I directed the work: what to build, what to check and when it was done. AI coding agents wrote and tested the code.

What the remake does

• The full original campaign: 100 levels across five worlds (grass, ice, circus, sand, hell) with the original maps, starting tribes, houses, trees and per-level research, plus the original MIDI soundtrack, all read at runtime from an owned copy of the game. The full engine is not distributed.
• The Hand: carry Baldies and drop them into houses.
• Four jobs: workers breed, builders build, soldiers fight and make ammunition, scientists research.
• Building with flags, the Shovel reshaping land and water, and Wings.
• Inventions you research and deploy.
• A Hairy AI that builds, breeds, raids and crosses water, after an opening truce.
• Save anywhere and continue; resume was identical in all 8 tested situations.
• An attract mode that plays itself.
• The original 1996 art read from an owned copy, or levels and art it generates itself: the procedural edition that runs on this site.
• It runs on a Windows 11 PC. The procedural edition also runs in a web browser with nothing to install.

Why Baldies

I wanted to know whether AI could make remaking old games easy, so I picked my favorite game that you can't get anymore. It was a side project next to my main research. People still want it too: on October 11, 2026 it had 341 votes on GOG's Dreamlist asking for it to come back.

Run it and change its rules

The procedural edition runs in your browser. It generates its own levels and uses only art made for this project, so it contains no original game files.

On the homepage it runs beside a rules panel: change walk speed, breeding rate, house capacity, Hairy difficulty or the cost of using the Hand while the game keeps going, and watch the population respond. Run it on the homepage.

What I did

Baldies Remastered is itself a combination. I had built two earlier remakes of Baldies by directing two different AI coding tools. Each had parts the other lacked: one had the better engine, the other had worked out the original level data. I directed AI coding agents to merge them into one game. I decided what to keep, what to check and when a change was done.

Imagine taking 10 of your favorite games or programs and combining them. That is where I think this goes. What would you combine? Tell me.

The full engine reads the original levels and art at runtime from an owned copy of the game, and is not distributed. No original game art or files are shown on this site or included in the procedural edition.

What changes when software can be rebuilt from the outside

Preservation comes first for me: great programs should not vanish when the machines they ran on do. This is my view of the trade-offs. Both lists below are real.

Only rebuild things you have the right to, or that are licensed for it, and never redistribute the original's files.

Upsides I think people are missing

• Preservation. Programs that no longer run can be kept alive and studied.
• Learning from great designs. Rules that were only remembered can be read, tested and changed.
• Escaping lock-in. Your files and habits are less tied to one company keeping one program alive.
• Software as material. Captured rules can be reused, mixed and poured into new forms.

Downsides to take seriously

• Copying gets cheap, including copying other people's work without permission.
• Rights are harder to enforce when a program can be rebuilt without its code.
• Finding exploits gets easier, because the same methods that recover rules also find weaknesses.

REA is an independent, open-source (MIT) toolkit for reverse engineering with AI agents. Its repository was created on April 14, 2026 and had more than 115,000 GitHub stars on October 11, 2026. It was not used for Baldies, and its results are its own claims.

What was checked

These checks ran on build c37f1b5 and were run again on October 11, 2026 on a fresh copy of the code, by an AI coding agent at my direction. The browser edition and live rules controls are newer than these checks. Read the full verification record.

• 334 automated tests pass on a fresh copy of the code.
• All 100 original campaign levels load in 4 views, from several camera positions, with 0 errors. The slowest level loaded in 479 ms.
• Save and continue resumed identically in 8 tested situations: 7 earlier states after 600 more game ticks, and an invention being installed mid-flight on levels 10, 25 and 61.
• All 6 corrupted save files left the game running with a message. A deliberately malicious save was refused without running any code.
• 9,000 random inputs, in three seeded runs of 3,000, caused 0 exceptions.
• An AI red team found 7 problems on October 9. All 7 were fixed and rechecked at build 01415d3.

Limits

• The rules are the new engine's own tuning. They have not been checked against the original game.
• No outside human playtest yet. The red team was an AI review, not an outside human review.
• The browser edition's performance has not been measured.
• The browser edition and the live rules controls came after the checks above and were not part of them.
• The full engine and the test logs are not public; the browser edition's Python code is served with it.
• The full engine needs an owned copy of the game for the original levels and art, and is not distributed. No original game files are distributed.