A low-poly SimCity 2000 clone: Opus 5.5 reverse-engineered the original PowerPC code with 27 subagents and validated it over 10,000 game days.
City 2026 is a modern low-poly SimCity 2000 clone that, in the author's words, is "a clone of simcity 2000 I (using Opus 5.5) built over a few days." The build story is one of the wildest in recent Show HN history: it started from a single prompt, then Opus 5.5 deployed 27 subagents to reverse-engineer the original game's PowerPC code function by function — running it through the Unicorn emulator with a harness of faked Mac system calls written in Python — and validated the result over 10,000 simulated game days.
The output is a faithful recreation of the 1993 classic's complete game logic, wrapped in a modern low-poly aesthetic with smoke effects, depth of field and ambient sound. The bitmap image assets were generated by GPT Image 2, and the whole thing runs as a TypeScript/WebGL app in the browser — click to start and you're building a city.
This is vibe coding as engineering archaeology: not a wrapper around an API, but an AI-led decompilation and reimplementation of a 30-year-old masterpiece, verified by simulation rather than eyeballing. It landed on Show HN on October 6, 2026, and plays end to end.
curated by the VibeFix editors