Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally.
Gaming mods have always been a little unhinged, but I don't think even the most ambitious modders could have anticipated the kind of nonsense we're witnessing right now. Thanks to AI-assisted coding, modders are putting Spider-Man in Batman: Arkham Knight, or bringing Super Mario into Elden Ring. It's as if every modder is chasing increasingly ridiculous things to mod into other games.
These aren't character swaps or texture packs that we can download from Nexus Mods. Instead, these are proper transplantations of gameplay systems into games that were never designed to accommodate them. These mods are spectacular; they're hilarious, and so ludicrous that I can't get enough of them. However, there's a lot more going on here than a few viral clips on Reddit or X.
Gaming mods have officially lost the plot
Vibe-coded mods are getting gloriously ridiculous
I used to think that modders putting Thomas the Tank Engine into Skyrim was peak gaming chaos. Of course, that was before the latest wave of AI-assisted mashups, which are making Master Chief in Resident Evil 5 look rather tame. We're seeing attempts to bring Spider-Man's web-swinging into Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Knight, or turn Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 into a skateboarding playground with Skate 3's tricks and scoring system.
There's a common thread here, though. These aren't weapon swaps or character-skin replacements. These projects try to recreate or transplant gameplay systems like traversal, combat, or driving, placing them into games that just weren't built to support them.
Take Spider-Man in Arkham Knight, for instance. Swinging through Gotham is one thing, but getting a completely different game's traversal mechanics to co-operate with Batman's world is something else entirely.
I played Skate 3 inside GTA Vice City myself
It was surprisingly simple to get running
You may have seen these mods online, but not every demo includes a finished mod you can download and play immediately. Regardless, plenty of Rust Engine rewrites are downloadable and playable at the moment. As long as you have the official game files for each game, you can play GTA IV, GTA III, or GTA Vice City, or San Andreas with Skate 3's skating physics and animations. In fact, someone even got Skate 3's systems playable inside Fortnite's current OG Season 4.
That's exactly what I did: I borrowed a friend's Skate 3 DVD for the Xbox 360, extracted it, and superimposed it onto my GTA Vice City (the original one) files. All I had to do was use the GUI that lets you play Skate inside the GTA 3D trilogy, depending on which iteration you have.
Within fifteen minutes, my Tommy Vercetti was throwing ollies right in front of the Vice City beach. The cars on Ocean Drive lost their collision models, sure, and Tommy occasionally fell into invisible wormholes in the ground, but overall the game ran stable, and I even completed the first couple of missions while riding my skateboard at 50% gravity.
What's even more interesting is that I could have done the same with Claude (the protagonist) in GTA III and CJ in San Andreas, and I wouldn't have had to download anything other than my own versions of those games — the GUI would've remained the same, and the Skate 3 files as well.
There's more to these mods than just asking Claude to write it
It requires reverse engineering, runtime bridges, and controlled chaos
It's easy to assume that these "vibe-coded" mods mean that Claude is just generating code for Spider-Man to magically appear in Gotham. However, the reality is considerably more complicated. These projects rely on AI coding agents, but developers still have to inspect unfamiliar code, understand a game's systems, write compatibility layers to bridge into another game, and troubleshoot the inevitable parade of errors that follows. The modder still has to figure out what needs to communicate with what.
The Rust rewrite approach is even more interesting. Developers rebuild a game's runtime using Rust and engines like Bevy, then load assets from the original installation. Once mechanics live in portable code, separate rewrites can be combined into one program, turning cross-game mashups into something far more modular.
Then there are other projects which take a considerably more chaotic route. They run two games simultaneously and bridge their systems. Like in the case of Spider-Man in Arkham Knight's Gotham City, the latter supplies the game world, while the former handles the mechanics. Then, the underlying software translates the inputs and gameplay information between the two.
Modders are literally convincing two entirely different games, built on different engines, to somehow cooperate and share assets and systems — that's not a sentence I ever thought I'd be writing.
The viral clips don't show the whole picture, though
Making a convincing demo is not the same as making the entire game work
We've seen these viral mashups through short clips on Reddit and X, but we've yet to see hour-long gameplay sessions on YouTube, and there's a reason for that. Getting Spider-Man to swing through Gotham for about 20 seconds makes for a pretty viral clip, but the fun ends when he smacks into a building that exists in Spider-Man's collision data but not in Gotham City's transplanted environment.
These projects have to contend with mismatched physics, incompatible animations, broken collision detection, and gameplay systems that were never designed to communicate with one another. After all, getting two games to cooperate briefly is easier than merging their worlds for longer hours.
There's also everything else the clips don't show — missions not working, enemies failing to react, or the game crashing within minutes. A convincing proof of concept doesn't fix these inevitable problems, nor does it guarantee a downloadable mod that anyone can install.
I'm not criticizing the modders, though. Experimental projects are supposed to break things, but remember these mashups aren't reliable yet.
Nobody knows where the ceiling is with AI modding
Despite all the jank, broken collision detection, and inevitable crashes, I find it difficult not to get excited about what these experiments represent. Game modding has always been driven by people who rip out fundamental parts of games and replace them with something different, just out of sheer curiosity.
We're still a long way from a world where anyone can mash two games together over a weekend and expect a polished experience. But if AI can help more people turn ridiculous ideas into working prototypes, I don't see why we should complain about a few spectacular failures along the way.
Some of the most interesting things in PC gaming have come from people refusing to stop at "good enough." This new wave of modding is no different.
