A Google DeepMind exec who can't code used AI to port a 2003 PC game to the iPhone

A product designer at Google DeepMind used Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 to port a 23-year-old PC game to the iPhone — natively, not through an emulator, and in 40 minutes for the first successful build.

Ammaar Reshi is the person in question. He runs product and design for Google’s AI Studio. Before DeepMind, he designed interfaces at Palantir, led design at fintech startup Brex, and handled brand and product design at ElevenLabs. He studied poetry in college. He has never written a line of C++ in his life.

He does, however, have a habit of making noise with AI weekend projects. In late 2022, Reshi used ChatGPT to write a story and Midjourney to illustrate it, producing a children’s picture book called Alice and Sparkle over a single weekend. The internet reacted exactly as you’d expect — coverage everywhere, furious illustrators everywhere.

This time, the tools changed but the role stayed the same. Midjourney became Claude Fable 5. The picture book became a 23-year-old C++ game engine. And Reshi still didn’t write code — he gave orders like a general commanding troops.

The game is Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour, the 2003 pinnacle of EA’s RTS series. Its engine runs DirectX 8. It’s 1.6 million lines of C++. To render on an iPhone’s Metal graphics API, every frame travels through a five-layer translation chain: DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal. Every layer is a chance to drop frames, crash, or render digital garbage.

The original audio engine (Miles), video decoder (Bink), and font renderer (GDI) are all Windows-exclusive components. Each had to be swapped for a cross-platform alternative.

Reshi’s first attempt used Claude Opus 4.8. It didn’t work. Game porting is a loop: build, error, diagnose, fix, rebuild — repeated dozens of times. The task requires maintaining context across dozens of files simultaneously, which is exactly what Fable was designed to handle.

Switching to Fable 5, the first build took 40 minutes. Campaign mode, skirmish, and the Generals Challenge all ran smoothly. Sound worked. Full stop.

But running the graphics pipeline was only half the problem. RTS games are built for mouse and keyboard, not touchscreens. A finger press can’t send a click event immediately — the system has to wait for gesture recognition to decide whether it’s a single tap, a drag-select, or a two-finger pan. Early versions missed this step: two-finger scrolling triggered left-click on the first finger, sending units to their deaths at random.

Fable wrote an entire touch control system from scratch: tap to select, drag to box-select, long-press to deselect, two-finger scroll, pinch to zoom. All AI-generated.

The port also exposed a render bug that had been hiding in the source code for over two decades. The texture format fallback logic hardcoded a format without an alpha channel, turning the minimap’s fog-of-war layer into solid black blocks. On PC it never triggered. On iOS, MoltenVK’s format support differed just enough to expose it.

There are real limitations. The five-layer translation chain consumes significant GPU memory — on iPad, sustained play pushes past 3 GB, at which point iOS kills the process without warning. Multiplayer is impossible because the 2003 engine requires identical floating-point results on every machine every frame, which different CPU architectures cannot guarantee. What works is campaign and AI skirmish.

There’s no App Store version. To install, you need Xcode, the Vulkan SDK, and the ability to compile from source and side-load. The person who made it can’t install it without help from someone who can code.

EA open-sourced the source code for several Command & Conquer titles under GPL v3 in February 2025, thanks to a game preservation project led by Luke Feenan. The list included Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade, and Generals / Zero Hour. Red Alert 2 was conspicuously absent — EA reportedly lost the source code. The community picked up the desktop side. Reshi and Fable 5 filled in the mobile gap.

A new preservation pipeline is taking shape: publisher open-sourcing, community porting, AI compilation. It will only get faster from here.

Reshi’s own line is worth quoting: “I have never thought anything is impossible. It’s just a matter of time and iteration.” A man who cannot write C++ compiled 1.6 million lines of C++ DirectX 8 code onto a phone. It took less time than most people spend installing macOS on a PC they built.

The catch: he burned through an entire Max subscription in two days.

The old games you played as a kid aren’t waiting for programmers anymore. They’re waiting for anyone who can stare at a screen at 2 AM and say, “One more time.”

The source code and build instructions are available on GitHub.