Picture this: eight months of reverse-engineering a 1999 N64 racer by hand with a team of volunteers — and then somebody feeds your work to an AI and declares the job “finished.”
That’s what happened to Synamax. The musician, game historian, and developer has been leading a manual, human-led decompilation of Paradigm Entertainment and EA Canada’s Beetle Adventure Racing since February, aiming for a native PC port built the careful way. The decomp is roughly 30% complete — which, in reverse-engineering terms, is a mountain of work.
Then an LLM-assisted recomp turned up, built on his team’s decomp, and presented itself as the done deal. Synamax is not mincing words: he called it “insulting and hurtful,” telling Time Extension that any ethical hacker would look at an in-progress community project and leave it alone. He aimed the same charge at YouTube coverage that spotlighted the AI port without explaining its provenance: “Supporting this spits in the face of all the labour and passion we have put into this project.”
Here’s the wrinkle: legally, nobody broke a rule. The decomp was released under the AGPL 3.0 license, which permits this kind of reuse — and the rival developer’s own README states plainly that the continued work was “vibe coded with Claude Code.” Full transparency, no weaseling. Synamax’s argument isn’t about licenses; it’s about what he calls common decency.
The AI port’s quality record makes his point for him. It was forced up to 60fps, and because Beetle Adventure Racing was tuned to the N64’s exact hardware timing, everything wobbles: in the intro the cars burn through their replay data, stop “thinking,” and smash into walls like mindless zombies, the cutscene drags four seconds longer — long enough for a car to explode and respawn before the intro text even appears — and enemy racers got noticeably easier. Synamax figures it plays worse than plain old PJ64 or Ares emulation. Speed, it turns out, is a lousy substitute for understanding.
This isn’t a one-off. A similar fight erupted around Banjo-Tooie, where Dariosamo of the human-made Banjo Kazooie Recompiled blasted a YouTuber for covering an AI-assisted port without disclosing its distance from the original team’s tooling.
It’s personal, too. Synamax lost his job of seven years to AI and is still unemployed; he hoped this project’s exposure might open doors. He plans a documentary about the saga when the real work is done — he previously made a three-hour documentary out of his Sinistar reverse-engineering research, so he doesn’t do these things by halves.
“We may not be the first to do the recomp,” Synamax says, “but we’re going to be the first human-led recomp.” The slow build made by people who understand why every frame behaves the way it does is the one worth waiting for. Would you rather play the fast knockoff, or the version made by the guy who fell in love with the game at a Nickelodeon hotel in Orlando?
Sources: Time Extension (Oct 7, 2026) and Console Classics (Oct 8, 2026), with the primary source being the Beetle Adventure Racing recomp GitHub project. AI-use disclosure: the rival project’s own README states its continued work was “vibe coded with Claude Code”; Synamax’s human-led claim is his own.