Claude Code picked up a new rule around October 27, delivered server-side under the name tengu_heron_brook. Two sentences:
Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.
Addy Osmani, on Anthropic’s technical staff, confirmed it:
We added two sentences to Claude Code’s prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy.
Kyle Orland, at Ars, on whether it will work:
The tsunami of imitators is way bigger than any one model maker can stem.
Right. But the clones are the easy case. The rule’s own wording, “a recreation of a specific existing game”, describes almost nothing the scene has actually been doing. Held Games went and counted:
A community tracker that catalogues AI assisted game reverse engineering listed 273 projects on 30 October 2026, and credited Claude in 226 of them.
And, drily:
The headlines said decompilation. The rule does not.
A port is not a recreation. Nobody is rewriting the game. The game’s own compiled code runs, out of a dump you provide, and the work goes into the shim underneath it: a loader, memory and syscalls, a renderer that translates PS4 GPU commands to Vulkan. That lives somewhere else entirely from reskinning Balatro and calling it yours, and the two sentences can’t tell them apart, because they were written about the other thing.
Which is how I spent last week playing Crash Team Racing1 on my couch.2
OCTR is Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, the PS4 one, running natively on Windows and Linux with online multiplayer on a community server. It needs your own decrypted copy, it’s GPL v2, and it’s free: “No donations… online play is free and the same for everyone.”
The credits do not hedge: Claude is credited on both the Windows port and the Ryu7w7 fork :-)
In the Crash subreddits this thing gets hated. AI slop, piracy, disrespecting Beenox, the usual. And in the same subreddits, all week, people asking how to get it working3 — enough of them that r/crashteamracing’s mods pinned a post telling everyone to take their bugs to GitHub instead. Both things are true at once: it is an AI-built port of somebody else’s game, and it is also the only way to play CTR at 4K with a populated online lobby, for free, in 2026, seven years after Activision shipped it and walked away.4
It is also, very visibly, a work in progress: 105 open issues as I write this, one of them mine. My kart kept hopping on its own mid-drift on Linux, with a Steam Controller, every few seconds, while I was holding nothing but the drift button. The cause turned out to be a 250 ms timeout: if SDL_UpdateJoysticks() on the pad thread takes longer than that, the game reads a neutral controller state, so a held button registers as released and then pressed again. Guess who found the bug (hint: not me).
Footnotes
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Not my actual Japanese PS1 copy, which needed a new power supply first. ↩
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The couch PC was already there. The Steam Controller I had to work for: scalpers are asking something like $250 on eBay for the $99 pad (listings have gone as high as $556), and my notify-me entry is estimated for 2027. So I bought the 512GB Steam Machine bundle at $1,128, which comes with a controller, for the controller. I regret nothing and I would like that on the record. ↩
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Installing it took ten minutes, and I didn’t do that part either: I asked Claude to SSH into my Bazzite PC, pointed it at the NAS where my dumps live, and went to make coffee. Make of that what you will. ↩
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Asked about a PC port last year, the game’s director said one was never planned or in development: it would have needed a dedicated PC team, Beenox’s was busy with Call of Duty’s PC ports, and there was no budget for a second one. ↩