Some games die quietly. They get delisted, lose their multiplayer servers, fade into the digital void. Others get remastered by the original authors with slightly better graphics and a battle pass.

And then there’s the third way: you open the binary in ghidra and start naming functions.

I played this top-down shooter from 2003 with my roommates, and recently remembered the gameplay but couldn’t remember the name. And today I stumbled upon a recreation of it, with an incredible knowledge base for the mechanics and implementation details.

You can run it now with one command, uvx crimsonland@latest, if you have uv installed. If that’s not amazing enough, this was completed in only two weeks with the help of GPT-5.2, and the source code is available.