What reverse engineering and modernising an old war game tells us about the economic impact of the transformer

Georg Zoeller’s essay from porting and modernising War of the Lance (1989) with local and frontier models: how transformers commoditize skilled knowledge work, smash IP-based economics, and reshape the games industry.

Some observations from my War of the Lance (1989) Code Harness assisted modernisation (WIP).

I gave Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next a job: Reverse engineer and port War of the Lance (1989) to modern browsers. It took about a week on a single local lane, but it got the job done: faithful reproduction of rendering and game rules in a new Three.js rendering engine. A few days later I started modernising it into a Total War meets Heroes of Might and Magic–like experience while keeping the original underneath.

In the past, one would have chosen another AAA game for a “total conversion,” but in this new transformer world, synthesising the exact features and renderer is easier and faster.

It's not just code

With Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, 3D modelling via Blender headless APIs became usable for this type of game. Instant, usable 3D assets “unbounds” design—you can order custom assets as a token micro-transaction, only limited by renderer considerations.

For War of the Lance, reverse engineering, renderer optimisation, and building something new on a browser stack involved a single person with a full-time job and less than 4 hours of dedicated harness attention over a week.

The trend line is brutal

A local model equivalent to a frontier model from April/May can reverse engineer and port a game like this in a week on a business workstation.
With cloud worker lanes, that drops to ~2 days.
A September 2026 frontier model can do it in a few hours with shrinking human intervention—and that time will shrink to minutes in 18–36 months.

Since the start of the year I’ve been porting retro games to web (Kaiser 2, Ultima 6, Populous, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Darklands, and many more). Minor-version bumps and single-digit benchmark gains are misleading: long-range, multi-hour task completion has skyrocketed.

It's no longer the job it used to be

The human is a “bot herder” whose role is intent, taste, and occasional critical validation. I never touched an IDE, Blender, RE tool, command line, or source control in this project. The harness plays the old game in DOSBox-X and its own creation via Playwright while writing regression tests.

The Transformer solves the knowledge economy

Contrary to AGI hype, the transformer does not solve human intelligence. But it does “solve” a fundamental aspect of our economic system: diffusing and applying knowledge. Human brains were the storage medium and application device; the difficulty of acquiring knowledge was the price-making mechanism. The transformer competes as a medium and partial applicator with economies of scale humans and smaller players cannot match.

IP or Transformer, choose one

You can't have an IP-based economy and pervasive AI use with current laws, because the transformer launders and strips copyright—and copying beats creating every time. Whatever you spend designing and researching, competition can reverse-engineer for pennies and spend on marketing instead.

The Coming Storm for the Game Industry

Every job profile will change; many will not survive. The real winners of commoditized creation are attention platforms: more content → more competition for attention → higher ad prices—leaving everyone but the platform fighting to the margins.

He writes without AI and has nothing to sell. Full essay, tooling notes, and updates at the canonical URL.