One Must Fall 2097 Remastered Rebuilds the 1994 Robot Fighter in TypeScript and WebGL, With F2 Swapping VGA and HD Mid-Fight
Jared Woodruff's remaster plays the original game files in a browser or a desktop app, redraws more than 3,200 images in HD, and lets one key flip back to the 320-by-200 original at any moment. He credits Claude as his AI coder.
One Must Fall 2097 came from Diversions Entertainment in 1994 and was published by Epic MegaGames. It has been “freeware since 1999,” which is the only reason a project like this can ship the game at all.
Woodruff’s README describes “a faithful reimplementation of the game’s engine that plays the original game files,” built “following the reverse engineering of OpenOMF.” The soundtrack “plays through a port of the game’s own music driver,” the MASI driver, mixed in an AudioWorklet.
There are two pictures. Classic mode is “the original VGA picture, rebuilt on the GPU: 320 × 200 pixels through the game’s palette and its 19 color tables, exactly like 1994.” The other is the HD set. “One key, F2, switches between the two at any moment, even mid-fight.”
The HD art is matched to the game’s pictures “by a fingerprint of their pixels, so the game’s code doesn’t know it’s there.” The effects layered on top work the same way. “They never touch the game’s state or its random numbers, so a fight plays out exactly the same with them on or off (a test checks it).” With every effect on, a frame takes about 8 milliseconds on an RTX 4080 at 1920 by 1200.
That determinism pays for two more features. Replays use the original .rec files and export to video or GIF. LAN play skips the usual netcode trick of sending positions back and forth: “Both computers play the very same fight, each running the game itself, tick for tick: they only tell each other what their player pressed.” It runs on port 2097, naturally. Online play is listed as “coming soon.”
There’s a training lab with frame data, hitboxes and combo trials “found by searching the game itself and checked against all eleven robots.” Four new robots and new arenas ship as a mod that’s off by default. “Games used to come with a booklet, so this one does too,” and the booklet is a 32-page manual. The test suite is “350 tests that run the game itself, headless, against the original data.”
The credits name three coders: “Jared Woodruff (human coder), Claude Opus 5.5 in Max Mode (AI coder), and OpenAI GPT6-ASTRA in Ultra Mode (the HD artwork).” The announcers come from the ElevenLabs voice library, and Hadal Static’s “Twenty Ninety-Seven (Remix)” is used with permission. Even the credits are a fight. Each credit pilots a robot “against something the remaster had to beat (tech debt, spaghetti code, pixel noise, dead air).”
The repository went up on September 27. Version 0.4.0 shipped October 15, and the releases have been downloaded a couple of hundred times. The Windows and macOS builds aren’t signed or notarized, and Windows XP through 8.1 can’t run it.
The README says the online mode is coming. Whether “tick for tick” holds up over the open internet, with real latency instead of a LAN cable, is the test it hasn’t taken yet.