Google executive uses Claude Fable 5 to port 2003 PC game to iPhone

Google executives used Claude to port classic retro games to iPhone, burning through their subscription.

Article author and source: AI New Era

[Overview] Google’s product lead natively ported the 2003 PC classic to the iPhone using Claude Fable 5—at the cost of burning through an entire Max subscription in two days.

A senior executive at Google DeepMind used Anthropic’s AI to force a 2003 game onto an iPhone.

You didn’t misread.

This person is Ammaar Reshi, Head of Product and Design at AI Studio.

He natively compiled “Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour” on iOS using Claude Fable 5—campaign mode, skirmishes, and General Challenges are all fully playable.

Runs on a real engine, natively compiled for ARM64, not an emulator.

A designer who studies poetry—everything that goes viral is an AI project.

Interestingly, Reshi’s career path has nothing to do with being a programmer.

He is a designer by training and studied poetry in college.

After graduation, I started with product design at data giant Palantir, then moved to fintech company Brex as Design Director, and later led brand and product design at AI voice unicorn ElevenLabs.

Joined Google DeepMind in 2024 as Head of Product and Design for AI Studio.

He sketched countless designs along the way but never wrote a single line of C++.

But Reshi has a habit of using AI for weekend projects, and each time, it makes quite a splash.

At the end of 2022, he spent a weekend using ChatGPT to write a story and Midjourney to create illustrations, producing a children’s picture book titled *Alice and Sparkle*.

At the time, major media outlets competed to report on it, and the illustrator community erupted in outrage.

Here he comes again. This time, the tool has switched from Midjourney to Claude Fable 5, and the target has changed from a children’s picture book to a 23-year-old C++ game engine.

What remains unchanged is his role: he doesn’t write code himself but gives instructions to AI like a general.

I never believe anything is impossible— it’s just a matter of time and iteration.

1.6 million lines of C++, five-layer translation packed into an iPhone

The original version of this game ran on DirectX 8, with an entire engine consisting of 1.6 million lines of C++. To render it on iPhone using Metal, there is a five-layer translation chain in between:

DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal

Each layer is a format conversion, and each layer may drop frames, crash, or render a screen full of digital garbage.

Moreover, fixing rendering alone isn’t enough. The original audio engine Miles, video decoder Bink, and font rendering GDI are all Windows-specific components and must each be replaced with cross-platform alternatives.

Reshi initially tried Opus 4.8, but couldn’t get it working.

The reason is that game porting involves a cycle of build → error → diagnose → fix → rebuild, repeated dozens of times. This task requires maintaining context across dozens of files, which is precisely Fable’s design target.

After switching to Fable 5, the first build took only 40 minutes. All three modes ran smoothly, with the original soundtrack fully intact.

The screen is working, but the player’s finger hasn’t landed yet.

After all, the mouse-and-keyboard logic of an RTS game is entirely different from touch screen input. A finger touch cannot immediately trigger a click event—it must wait until the gesture is recognized to determine whether it’s a single selection, box selection, or two-finger pan.

The early version missed this step: when pinching to zoom the map, the first finger would accidentally trigger a left-click, causing troops to be randomly sent to their deaths.

To this end, Fable has rebuilt an entire native touch system: tap to select, drag to box-select, long-press to cancel, two-finger scroll, and pinch to zoom—all written by AI.

It has to be said that code from 2003 running on 2026 hardware is rife with anachronisms.

First, the engine automatically adjusts graphics quality based on the GPU model, but its latest recognized GPU dates back to 2003. Upon encountering “Apple A19 Pro,” it searched everywhere but couldn’t identify it, so it immediately reduced texture precision to the lowest setting.

The fix is straightforward: force-write the high-quality settings on first launch, bypassing automatic detection.

More subtly, there is a rendering bug that has been hidden for over twenty years.

The fallback logic for texture formats is hardcoded to use formats without an alpha channel, causing the fog layer on the minimap to appear as solid black blocks.

The issue didn’t occur on PC, but on iOS, MoltenVK’s format support differs, immediately exposing the bug.

Open-source project: https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad

However, don’t rush to download just yet.

There is currently no App Store version; to install it, you must configure Xcode and the Vulkan SDK yourself, compile from source, and then sign and sideload the app.

That’s interesting—something created by someone who can’t code can currently only be installed by those who can.

And even if you install it, don’t get too excited yet.

One is memory explosion. Although the PC version requires only 128 MB, the five-layer translation chain incurs GPU memory overhead at each layer, causing memory usage on the iPad to surge above 3 GB after prolonged use. When iOS detects excessive memory pressure, it immediately terminates the process and returns to the home screen without any warning.

Online play is out of the question—the 2003 engine required identical floating-point results on every machine, frame by frame, which is impossible across different CPU architectures. Only skirmishes and AI battles are playable.

EA lost Red Alert 2, but gave Generals a second life.

It is worth noting that the Command & Conquer series was one of EA’s most illustrious RTS franchises, with Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour, released in 2003, representing its peak.

After that, it was downhill all the way—the EA shut down Westwood Studios, and the series nearly came to a halt.

In February 2025, EA open-sourced the source code of several C&C games under the GPL v3 license, driven by the game preservation project led by Luke Feenan.

The open-source list includes Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade, and Generals/Zero Hour.

The only one missing is Red Alert 2. The reason is absurd—EA lost the source code.

The community picked up the desktop version, and Reshi plus Fable 5 completed the mobile version.

Today, a new game preservation pipeline is emerging: publishers open-sourcing + community porting + AI compilation. Similar efforts will only become more common in the future.

Burned through the Max subscription in two days—the game is now running.

Back to Reshi’s statement: “I never believe anything is impossible. It’s just a matter of time and iteration.”

Someone who doesn’t even know how to write C++ managed to compile a 1.6-million-line C++ DirectX 8 game onto a smartphone—in less time than most people spend installing Hackintosh.

Of course, provided the quota is sufficient. Reshi burned through an entire Max subscription in two days.

But the old games you played as a child are now waiting not just for programmers, but for anyone who can stare at a screen at 2 a.m. and say, “Just one more time.”