Over the past few months (and particularly the past few weeks), it's become harder and harder to avoid hearing about "recomp" games from the history of Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo and other major game companies.

In a nutshell, this is a technique where games are recompiled to run on hardware they were never intended for, and the rapid advancement of AI is the primary reason behind many of these new recomps.

The main objective, it seems, is to convert older titles — think Xbox 360, PS3 era — and bring them to PC for the first time, although there have also been recomps for mobile devices like Android and iOS too.

Xbox knows about them as well. When announcing Xbox Labs (an experimental division dabbling in various technologies) earlier this month, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma referred to decompiled / recompiled games:

"In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another."

So how is this affecting their future? Well, as mentioned, Xbox Labs has been set up as a way of "experimenting" with what might be possible in months and years to come, and Sharma referenced in her announcement that the likes of recompiled games are challenging "long-held assumptions about our industry".

Nevertheless, she seems excited by the possibilities they could offer in the future:

"These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models."

Now, something we should make explicitly clear is that downloading unofficially recompiled games from Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo's history isn't recommended. The rules around recomps are bit muddied (although always require a legally-purchased copy of the game in question), but if Xbox or any other company wanted to re-release their games on new platforms, they'd obviously do it themselves.

In fact, that's exactly what Xbox has started doing with the backwards compatibility feature for PC in recent months, and there are more games on the way for it, so it's worth holding out for an official release of these games in our view.

Another thing to be aware of is that the overuse of AI is reportedly causing a lot of these recomps to crash regularly and suffer from a multitude of bugs. In other words, even though AI is making it possible to bring more old games to new hardware, the lack of quality control is what's holding the scene back in many cases.

Let's see how it all develops, eh? Maybe Xbox will come up with some official "recomps" of its own before long!

Have you come across recompiled games? Let us know your thoughts on them in the comments.