Activision and Bethesda hit AI-coded MW2 and Fallout fan projects with takedowns

Two AI-built fan projects based on major gaming franchises got shut down within days of each other — one a browser-playable Fallout set in New York, the other a genAI decompilation of the original Modern Warfare 2 on PC. Both Bethesda and Activision, both under the Microsoft umbrella, moved quickly to kill the projects.

The Fallout: New York project came from a developer going by ChrisFirst, who used Claude Opus 5.5 to build a browser-based open-world game that procedurally generated every building, weapon, face, and sound entirely through code — no texture files, no audio assets. It had quests, dialogue trees, V.A.T.S., and a working Pip-Boy. The initial post on September 28 pulled in over 3.5 million views before Bethesda sent what ChrisFirst described as a cease and desist for IP infringement. He confirmed on October 1 he was walking away, posting a screencap of the legal threat alongside the message: "Hey, Bethesda Studios how about you make a Fallout game instead so I don't have to?" The second project, from Maurice Heumann, used AI agents — 17 running in parallel — to decompile the source code of the original Modern Warfare 2. Heumann said the game was fully playable with most bugs cleared, and he even got a nuke killstreak. Activision responded by disabling the video footage he'd shared, replacing it with a copyright takedown notice, and the site hosting the code went dark shortly after. Heumann's subsequent posts complained that his AI agents had also deleted his own work in the process.

Both cases sit inside a broader and rapidly escalating tension between AI-assisted fan development and IP enforcement. Vibe-coded projects that borrow heavily from recognizable game franchises have been going viral on a near-daily basis, and publishers are increasingly reaching for legal tools to contain them. What's notable here is that neither Activision nor Bethesda has taken any public legal action against the AI companies whose tools made these projects possible — the enforcement is aimed squarely at individual developers, not the underlying technology.

That approach is already drawing comparisons to the music industry's war on Napster in the early 2000s — a fight the labels technically won in court but ultimately lost culturally, as the behavior they were trying to suppress only accelerated. One person responding to the takedowns put it bluntly: "Going after the little guys instead of the technology, this is Napster and music industry 2.0, we already saw how this plays out, we win they lose." Whether publishers can keep up with the pace of these projects — or whether they'll eventually pivot to targeting the AI platforms themselves, as some Hollywood studios have begun doing — remains an open question.