alt Hacker News> To get the game to start you need one file from the original settlers 1 game because graphics and sounds are read from there.
Leaving aside the moral aspect of compensation for the artists who created the original graphics and sounds (who probably won't see any money from sales of the original game anyway), would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
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If I included the exact same graphics as the original, but I did paint them all by hand myself, would you think that makes a difference? No it doesn’t. And what you are proposing is just the same with extra steps. They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.
There is no issue with creating new graphics and sounds from the scratch, OpenTTD did exactly that for Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It’s not identical but is enough to convey original intent and be freely available.
>would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?
Sounds like clean room design. If you can prove the art was independently created, and you weren't just abusing the process to launder the original works (eg. prompting the AI a bazillion times until it looked exactly the same as the original), then you'd probably be fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design