A GameCube brawler released back in 2001 has arrived on PC, courtesy of a modding effort that took six years to reach completion.
Super Smash Bros. Melee is now decompiled at 100%. Everything sits on GitHub, and the release ships with instructions, so prior expertise isn’t a requirement.
What a decompilation actually is
To decompile a game is to take the finished product and reconstruct its original source code, allowing it to run on a console or a PC. For Melee, that turns a disc that demands a GameCube into a download that demands nothing of the sort.
The result: for the first time in nearly three decades, Nintendo’s fighter is running on hardware Nintendo never intended for it.
The announcement, and the argument that followed
The news came from Twitter/X user Reticent, who shared the download link and wrote, ” Super Smash Bros. Melee is now 100% decompiled! *Used with AI (Claude).”
That single asterisk carried enormous weight. The comment section filled up quickly, and a good number of fans objected to the AI credit.
The pushback against the pushback was immediate. “Works on a decomp for six grueling years straight, used AI to cross the finish line and all it did was generate one-to-one versions of the original game code,” one user shared. “Everyone calls it slop, not understanding the difference between AI recomps and AI decomps.”
A second commenter backed that view up: “For people saying “slop”: this has been in the works since 2020, if you still think its slop, it’s been in the works before AI was good enough to do full decompilations (they still can’t, they still need to be watched by humans).”
Why anyone still cares about a 2001 fighting game
Released in 2001 for the GameCube, Melee was a crossover fighter developed by HAL Laboratory and Nintendo. Its roster gathered characters from Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Pokémon and Donkey Kong under one banner, spread across a range of stages and game modes.
No other GameCube title sold more copies. Reviewers singled out the visuals, the cast, the soundtrack and the controls for praise, and the game is still counted among one of the most influential video games ever made.
The Nintendo Wii got Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008 as the follow-up. Melee, meanwhile, never faded away.
Six years of labour, a credit war playing out in the replies, and a 24-year-old GameCube game parked on GitHub for anyone to grab. That is where Melee stands in 2026.