One of the most closely watched reverse-engineering projects in gaming has reached the finish line. The doldecomp group completed the full decompilation of Super Smash Bros. Melee, released in 2001 for the GameCube. All of the game's code has been rebuilt in readable form, and artificial intelligence tools helped in the final stretch, which sparked a debate in the community.

What was done

The project started in 2020 and works on the US version of the game. According to XenoSpectrum, which tracks the project's scoreboard, the last function was rebuilt on September 7, 2026. There are 19,828 functions in total, and the executable built from the new code is identical to the original.

This kind of work is called matching decompilation. Volunteers write code, function by function, that, when built with the same compiler as back then, produces exactly the same machine instructions as the original game. Each function passes or fails an automatic check, so there's no "almost done": the scoreboard only hits 100% when everything matches.

Where AI comes in

The 100% announcement on X carried an asterisk: "used with AI (Claude)." In the project history, at least one contributor wrote that two contributions were "implemented and verified with Codex and Astra," OpenAI tools and models. Held Games goes further and says an OpenAI model helped close the final stretch in a few days.

XenoSpectrum adds an important caveat: the two contributions cited add up to less than a tenth of a percentage point of the total, and the public record doesn't show what took the project from about 93% to 100% in September. In other words, AI took part, but six years of human work did most of it.

The controversy

The AI credit split fans. Part of the community criticized the use of the tools, while others pointed out that in matching decompilation, AI only proposes code that has to reproduce the original byte for byte, and people still review every contribution. That's very different from generating a new game with AI.

Can you play it on PC?

Not directly. The repository rebuilds the GameCube executable and doesn't include the game: to build it, you have to extract the main file from your own copy of the disc. The project's value lies elsewhere: with readable code, it gets easier to make mods, study the game and, eventually, build versions for other platforms. According to the repository itself, the work now is naming and cleaning up the code.

Why it matters

Melee is one of the most played competitive games in history, and the full decompilation helps preserve it. The case also shows how AI is speeding up reverse engineering of older games, the subject of our article on how AI became a reverse-engineering tool.