I gave Claude my dead game's 30-year-old files and asked it to bring the game back to life

In 1992 I built an online multiplayer game called Legends of Future Past. It ran on CompuServe, won an award from Computer Gaming World, and shut down on the last day of 1999. I was 19 when I made it. The source code didn't survive. What I did have: hundreds of script files written in a little language I'd invented for Game Masters, a GM manual I wrote in 1998, and a gameplay recording from 1996. I gave all of this to Claude Code without much instruction beyond "figure out what this scripting language does and rebuild the game." What I got back genuinely surprised me. Claude reconstructed the grammar of a programming language that has never existed anywhere outside my game servers. No documentation on the internet, no Stack Overflow answers, no training data. It inferred the rules from the scripts themselves and a manual I'd written for non-technical GMs. Then it rebuilt the entire game — 2,273 rooms, 1,990 items, 297 types of monsters, 88 spells, a full crafting system, combat mechanics. A world that took me months to build originally was reconstructed in a weekend. The part I keep coming back to: this isn't Claude doing something it was trained to do. Nobody trained it on my scripting language. It did what a skilled human reverse-engineer would do — read examples, find patterns, build a mental model, and test its assumptions. It just did it in hours instead of weeks. The game is free to play at lofp.metavert.io and the code is open source at github.com/jonradoff/lofp. I wrote up the full technical story here if you want the deep dive.