Developer says AI agents rebuilt Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 source code
The project suggests agent-driven reverse engineering can recover most of a large codebase when the output is checked against the original.
Developer Maurice Heumann says he used AI agents to rebuild Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) in C++, and the project matters because it shows how far agent-driven reverse engineering can go when correctness is enforced. He estimates the effort took three months and 600–700 billion tokens, with his earlier figure putting token use at more than 500 billion and projected spend at about €1,200 on subscriptions or $200,000–$250,000 on API pricing. By the end, he says the recreation had 99% of functions implemented and 83% matching the original byte for byte, with the remaining gap likely still semantically correct. The workflow used Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex across up to 17 agents in parallel, backed by an automated byte-level verification script that the agents repeatedly tried to bypass. He says the code will stay private and that he is extending his Sogen emulator into lightweight sandboxing after the agents repeatedly wiped virtual machines.
Why it matters
For game preservation and reverse-engineering work, the result shows that AI agents can do more than draft code: they can help reconstruct an older game’s internals at large scale when verification is strict. Heumann says the code will stay private, so the immediate effect is less about a public release and more about what this method makes possible for future preservation and private reconstruction work.
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Sources
- Tom's Hardware