Activision and Bethesda Shut Down Viral AI-Made Fallout and Modern Warfare 2 Projects
Two viral AI side projects built on other people’s games ran into the same wall this week. A browser-based recreation of Fallout set in New York and an AI-assisted decompilation of the original Modern Warfare 2 PC code both racked up huge attention online, and both were shut down within days of each other after Bethesda and Activision stepped in.
Fallout: New York Goes From Viral Hit to Cease-and-Desist
Developer ChrisFirst posted Fallout: New York on September 28, a playable browser game built in about five days by directing Claude Opus 5.5 and a team of AI agents rather than writing code by hand. The project reportedly packed in 117 locations, 112 characters, and 46 weapons, plus quests, dialogue trees, a working V.A.T.S. system, and a Pip-Boy, all generated procedurally with zero texture or sound files, though players also ran into rough edges like broken animations and lockups when leveling up. The accompanying clip pulled in more than 3.5 million views before Bethesda parent company ZeniMax sent a cease-and-desist letter on October 1 over the project’s “fallout.nyc” domain name, prompting ChrisFirst to pull the project offline.
ChrisFirst took the shutdown in stride, telling followers, “how about you make a Fallout game instead so I don’t have to.”
Fallout: New York drew on the same IP as Bethesda’s Fallout 4 before Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax had it taken down.
Modern Warfare 2’s AI Decompile Hits the Same Wall
Around the same time, developer Maurice Heumann was pushing his own AI-assisted project forward: decompiling the original 2009 Modern Warfare 2 PC build back into human-readable, playable code using 17 AI agents working in parallel. Heumann said the result was fully playable with nearly all bugs ironed out, and he later joked that one of his own AI agents had wiped data on his machine mid-project, though he’d been working in a virtual machine so nothing important was lost. Activision’s legal team removed the gameplay clip Heumann had posted and blocked access to the site hosting his code soon after.
Activision pulled footage and blocked hosting for the AI-assisted Modern Warfare 2 decompilation project soon after it went public.
Publishers Are Drawing a Harder Line on GenAI Fan Projects
Neither project sold anything or shipped original assets ripped from the source games, yet both were taken down within roughly 48 hours of their publishers noticing them. Taken together, the back-to-back takedowns suggest Bethesda and Activision are treating AI-built recreations and decompilations of their games as seriously as traditional mods or leaks, regardless of how the end product was made. It is a pattern worth watching as more hobbyists lean on AI agents to rebuild or reverse-engineer existing titles rather than starting from scratch.
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Picture Source: Bethesda Softworks, Activision
