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yayachiken 1 days ago [-]
Amazing post, I loved this game as a kid.
Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.
And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.
Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D
vintagedave 1 days ago [-]
This is how an AI-assisted article should be: they used AI to decompile, find things out (with some very interesting techniques listed at the top of the article) but the article itself is human-written. It shows they used AI to help themselves understand, not used AI to do everything.
hlynurd 1 days ago [-]
How do you know it's human-written?
arcanemachiner 1 days ago [-]
Not OP, but I have to agree with them. The text just makes too much sense. There's no irrelevant shit tossed in for no reason, and I'm not really seeing any annoying LLM-isms.
Of course, I might be wrong.
isoprophlex 1 days ago [-]
i think its heavily edited, but there is a definite LLM influence
> the named animation sequence
noone abused verbs like this in the before times. a named animation sequence?? as opposed to what, ephemeral anonymous animation sequences?
asveikau 18 hours ago [-]
I think it's funny when people show poor knowledge of English grammar and confidently label their own exposure gap as a flaw.
Maybe it's a bit stuffy or formal, but yes, "the named sequence" is 100% something a real English speaking human would write. And if it's a sequence of frames forming an animation, it can absolutely be a named animation sequence.
treyd 1 days ago [-]
I've totally written a phrase like this before.
And in this context, literally yes that's what it sounds like. The .ani file can contain multiple animation sequences that each have a name.
MrGilbert 24 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's British English? I would use the wording like that. But I'm German. However, a "benannte Animationssequenz" is a perfectly valid construct in German, and doesn't sound weird at all given the context.
lazyasciiart 19 hours ago [-]
Uh, that would be a reference to the text at the beginning of that section
> Anything that moves is stored in an .ani file which is a sprite sheet and named animation sequences.
adamrezich 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah they could be indexed rather than named what's supposed to be the problem here
lirolero 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
jszymborski 1 days ago [-]
What matters more is that it passes as human-written.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
The text looks fine, but the image captions/titles has some AI vibes.
1 days ago [-]
grodriguez100 21 hours ago [-]
We don’t know, but that’s itself a good thing, isn’t it? if it is not “obvious AI slop” and looks human-written, then even if it was AI generated, that would be fine...
fredrikholm 1 days ago [-]
> I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't left my psyche ever since.
This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.
Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.
It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.
Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.
Gravityloss 1 days ago [-]
I think this is similar now in most things. Music or blog posts etc. Yet when you try to discover something, for some reason it's really hard to find good quality material.
A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.
glimshe 1 days ago [-]
This was a good example where a talented engineer worked hand in hand with AI to get the decomp to work.
I think some people are brute forcing it through a lot of agent time and expense, but they used 6.1 Sol Medium, a great but not a top capability AI model+effort.
This matches what I've been hearing regarding talent and experience making a big difference in task speed and cost when using AI. When prices stop being subsidized, this will be a key factor when evaluating engineer performance: "you've used a lot of tokens and don't have much to show for!"
Who knows where this is going to end, but Talent+AI still beats Vibe work by a lot.
starkparker 11 hours ago [-]
I've had a shocking amount of luck using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash for this. It's not particularly time efficient, but $20 ends up going a very long way on some simple late 80s-early 90s DOS games.
xyzzy_plugh 1 days ago [-]
I tend to agree with this perspective however I'd like to point out that using token quantity and cost as a measure of productivity is counter-intuitive. The variance for a given task can be extremely high regardless of the input, not to say that there isn't any skill to prompting or that talent doesn't matter.
Ultimately it feels pretty similar to using lines of code as a measure.
Instead I recommend setting a budget per head and evaluating performance traditionally, allowing for exceptions in exceptional circumstances of course.
Geof25 21 hours ago [-]
I have noticed that too. Even here on hacker news people are bragging to burn through 100usd of tokens per hour while I know about friend who has forced Claude Code to write complete MCU emulator with peripherals including HSM just from leaked firmware and reference manual for less than 50Eur whole project.
Scaevolus 23 hours ago [-]
Rather than loading the raw approximate decompile code into SQLite, you'll likely get better results using Ghidra directly with tool calls through an MCP adapter. This is especially important when the analysis tracing fails, like with some complex indirect jump patterns with vtables. Xrefs and pattern searches are of course natively supported, and you can load in memory snapshots.
A simple "/goal analyze this codebase, assign names for each function, and creates named structs for parameters." works well, even with quite weak agents. Remember, parsing through heaps of text is their forte!
This setup also works for more exotic non-x86 architectures with more dynamic code loading, like PS2, N64, etc.
goobatrooba 15 hours ago [-]
Thank you for tour blast from the past. But I wonder if it's correct that the author calls it Pizza Connection 2 - rather I think the game is correct to call itself Pizza - there were Pizza Connection, Pizza Connection 2 and finally Pizza Syndicate, which I think is the one we see in the article.
That said, I too miss this game and think about it sometimes still decades later. It had a beautiful world, great mechanics, many interesting quirks and things to learn over time, and even cheats (you could 'punish' your gang members until their health bars were empty and then they became invincible!). Nice to see the artwork again and to learn how it was made and finally understand the Pizza rating!
One of the best features of the game was though the handbook - it came with a pizza recipe and motivated me and probably many other teen boys to take their first baking steps.
Thank you to the author and even more to the artists that made this cool game. Wish there was something like this again today.
goobatrooba 15 hours ago [-]
Actually Wikipedia tells me the author is correct, pizza syndicate came before connection 2 :-) and there is also 2018 remake on steam and an open source project!
> Pizza Tycoon (Pizza Connection) was followed by Fast Food Tycoon (Pizza Syndicate), and Fast Food Tycoon 2 (Pizza Connection 2),[8] developed by Software 2000. A fourth game, Pizza Connection 3 was developed by Gentlymad Studios in 2018.
> Pizza Connection 1 & 2 were released on GOG.com in January 2017.[9]
> In March 2026, Pizza Legacy, an open-source reimplementation of the Pizza Tycoon engine, was released for modern operating systems.[10]
I'd really love a followup post where you find the highest scoring pizza possible -- feels like you must min-max now, yes?
darksim905 14 hours ago [-]
I've never played this game, neat! But with all this decompiling, maybe someone will make an open source, neat sequel to Math for the Real world? that would be cool.
shastabolicious 17 hours ago [-]
Cool I guess but you don't really need to decompile the game to know that it uses dirty rects or that there's a lookup table for lighting or that the animations come from a sprite sheet
Toslink 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
zomtorg 1 days ago [-]
This is great write-up and it's great that we can use AI tools to peek behind the curtain of how games like these were made.
Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.
mdtrooper 1 days ago [-]
This kind of projects (OpenRCT2, OpenLoco, Open...) are absolutely awesome!
But all of them need one step, free assets under Creative Commons or similar licenses).
I remember the big change of OpenTTD when it became finally all free software.
I wish to know Blender3D to help this projects, but I am a regular IT guy.
mschuster91 18 hours ago [-]
> OpenLoco
To my knowledge this is a recreation in Unity, not a decompile, and it was done without AI assistance as it was the goal of the developer to learn Unity.
likoya 23 hours ago [-]
Classic Transport Tycoon allowed you to set a locomotive waiting on a street crossing to run over and destroy trucks and vehicles of the competition. I wonder if there is an equivalent in this game
goobatrooba 15 hours ago [-]
You were able to send guys with cockroaches, stinky cheese or rats to the competition, then call the health inspector on them. Or send punks there to scare customers. Or you could rough up their staff (and of course make sure to keep gang members close to your pizzerias as well to fight back when they do the same!). The gang members also were able to rob banks or prisons (to free captured mates) if I remember well, but it was a lot of effort to manage this.
martinknopf 24 hours ago [-]
Same for me with "Patrician 3". I loved to play this game back then. It was the first thing I wanted to copy when I taught myself programming. I'm still thinking about it from time to time.
cheapcheerful 24 hours ago [-]
I loved this era of games. Caesar 3 was a favorite. And of course RCT1.
jszymborski 1 days ago [-]
I played this game a lot as a kid (also Biz Tycoon). Very odd game, but I still love the pre-rendered 3D look of games likes these so much.
aerhardt 17 hours ago [-]
Saving this - I’m hoping to decompile SimGolf to play it on my Mac!
Prunkton 1 days ago [-]
These are literally the first and last sentences of the post and may change the perspective for European readers:
>Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator
nope, never hear of
>I actually call this game Pizza Connection 2 because that's the European name!
ah yes, I played that at a friends house!
stamich 21 hours ago [-]
Back then (about 30 years ago), there was a whole series of “Tycoon” games. Fast Food Tycoon was one of the better ones. And my favorite to this day is Sid Meyer's Railroad Tycoon.
godockly 17 hours ago [-]
Love it. Thanks so much for your blog post!
jnmandal 1 days ago [-]
Incredible write up. The visuals are amazing
zakupower 1 days ago [-]
This stereotype got me laughing
> Goths stay home until 09:00.
cellsstudio 1 days ago [-]
This is so fascinating. These kind of isometric games were really defining in my childhood so it's amazing to be able to peek behind the curtain in terms of how it all works to render. So interesting about the lighting and how they had pre-rendered .spr files for windows alongside the regular lighting. So cool!
rightbyte 1 days ago [-]
The move to 3d sim games was such a mistake for the industry. Pixelart was way better at the time. It took like 15 year to make it look good again and that with cartoony cell shading anyway.
vivzkestrel 22 hours ago [-]
- everyone does this with all the frontier models only all the time
- wanna see a post of people experimenting with all the models and do a write up on it.
- if nobody writes such a post, i will. i am in the process of decompiling multiple games
Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.
And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.
Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D
Of course, I might be wrong.
> the named animation sequence
noone abused verbs like this in the before times. a named animation sequence?? as opposed to what, ephemeral anonymous animation sequences?
Maybe it's a bit stuffy or formal, but yes, "the named sequence" is 100% something a real English speaking human would write. And if it's a sequence of frames forming an animation, it can absolutely be a named animation sequence.
And in this context, literally yes that's what it sounds like. The .ani file can contain multiple animation sequences that each have a name.
> Anything that moves is stored in an .ani file which is a sprite sheet and named animation sequences.
This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.
Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.
It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.
Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.
A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.
I think some people are brute forcing it through a lot of agent time and expense, but they used 6.1 Sol Medium, a great but not a top capability AI model+effort.
This matches what I've been hearing regarding talent and experience making a big difference in task speed and cost when using AI. When prices stop being subsidized, this will be a key factor when evaluating engineer performance: "you've used a lot of tokens and don't have much to show for!"
Who knows where this is going to end, but Talent+AI still beats Vibe work by a lot.
Ultimately it feels pretty similar to using lines of code as a measure.
Instead I recommend setting a budget per head and evaluating performance traditionally, allowing for exceptions in exceptional circumstances of course.
A simple "/goal analyze this codebase, assign names for each function, and creates named structs for parameters." works well, even with quite weak agents. Remember, parsing through heaps of text is their forte!
This setup also works for more exotic non-x86 architectures with more dynamic code loading, like PS2, N64, etc.
That said, I too miss this game and think about it sometimes still decades later. It had a beautiful world, great mechanics, many interesting quirks and things to learn over time, and even cheats (you could 'punish' your gang members until their health bars were empty and then they became invincible!). Nice to see the artwork again and to learn how it was made and finally understand the Pizza rating!
One of the best features of the game was though the handbook - it came with a pizza recipe and motivated me and probably many other teen boys to take their first baking steps.
Thank you to the author and even more to the artists that made this cool game. Wish there was something like this again today.
> Pizza Tycoon (Pizza Connection) was followed by Fast Food Tycoon (Pizza Syndicate), and Fast Food Tycoon 2 (Pizza Connection 2),[8] developed by Software 2000. A fourth game, Pizza Connection 3 was developed by Gentlymad Studios in 2018.
> Pizza Connection 1 & 2 were released on GOG.com in January 2017.[9]
> In March 2026, Pizza Legacy, an open-source reimplementation of the Pizza Tycoon engine, was released for modern operating systems.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Tycoon
Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.
But all of them need one step, free assets under Creative Commons or similar licenses).
I remember the big change of OpenTTD when it became finally all free software.
I wish to know Blender3D to help this projects, but I am a regular IT guy.
To my knowledge this is a recreation in Unity, not a decompile, and it was done without AI assistance as it was the goal of the developer to learn Unity.
>Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator
nope, never hear of
>I actually call this game Pizza Connection 2 because that's the European name!
ah yes, I played that at a friends house!
> Goths stay home until 09:00.
- wanna see a post of people experimenting with all the models and do a write up on it.
- if nobody writes such a post, i will. i am in the process of decompiling multiple games