Rockstar has spent 20 years not making another Bully. One developer with a Mac and an AI coding agent decided to stop waiting. A developer who goes by ashen (oh-ashen-one on GitHub, @ashen_one on X) has published a free, playable port of Bully: Scholarship Edition running in Unreal Engine 5.8. Almost all of the code was written by Anthropic’s Claude.
As UNILAD Tech reported, a three-minute video shows the build running at 45 FPS at 1080p on a Mac. You can also talk to the students out loud through your microphone, and they answer in voiced replies. Ashen’s pitch on X was short: “If they won’t remaster the games then WE will!!!” Not everyone is impressed. GAMINGbible called the demo “bland.”
The short version
- A fan port of Bully: Scholarship Edition to Unreal Engine 5.8 is free on GitHub. The README says “almost everything” in it was written by AI, coordinated through Claude Code.
- It ships no game assets. You need a legally owned PC copy of the game, Unreal Engine 5.8, Xcode or another C++ toolchain, and Python. You build it yourself.
- About the first 20 minutes of Chapter 1 runs, plus the town map, brawling and voice chats with AI-driven students.
- Take-Two sued the makers of the GTA 3 and Vice City fan ports re3 and reVC in 2021. This project says it will come down “immediately” if Rockstar objects.
What the Bully remake actually is
The GitHub repo was created on October 15, 2026, and had 238 commits by October 29. The README calls the project a “1:1 fan port” but is careful about what that means today. It calls it an experiment to try and build on, “not a finished remake,” with no promise of a full campaign or a release date.
Here is what works, according to the README. The opening stretch of Chapter 1 runs end to end, roughly 20 minutes of story, with the original cutscenes, classes and minigames. The outdoor town map is in, with pedestrians, drivable cars and rides. You can start a fight with any student on campus. Later chapters are not there yet.
The repo is also unusually honest about the rough edges. It lists foot sliding when sprinting, missing start, stop and turn animations, pedestrians walking through each other, approximate lighting and materials, and a faculty character who is a silent stand-in. It even admits that the headline “1080p, 45 FPS” figure has not been confirmed by a real-time benchmark yet. That number comes from the developer’s own Mac footage.
How it uses Rockstar’s files without shipping them
This is the part that matters legally. The repo contains no textures, models, audio or maps from Bully. The README says plainly: “No original game assets are included here and none ever will be.” Instead, importer scripts read your installed PC copy of Scholarship Edition on your own machine and convert the content into Unreal formats. That converted data lands in git-ignored folders, and the README asks users not to share it.
The project’s own code is MIT licensed. The README also states that this license grants no rights to Bully’s content, which stays with Rockstar and Take-Two. The project is non-commercial, with no sales, donations or ads.
Setup is a developer workflow, not a download-and-play installer. It was built on Apple Silicon Macs, the launch scripts are Mac-specific, and Windows and Linux are listed as unverified. Ashen runs the original PC game through CrossOver for side-by-side reference.
How much did Claude actually write?
Nearly all of it, by the developer’s account. “Almost everything in this repository was written by AI, on Macs,” the README says, with Claude Code orchestrating several subagents. The human’s job, in the README’s words, was “direction, playtesting, taste, and saying ‘no.'” It says the core systems landed in the first four days, and the AI conversation system and campus-wide brawling arrived on day five.
That is vibe coding in its purest form. Andrej Karpathy coined the term in a post on X on February 2, 2025, describing a way of building software where you let the AI generate code and mostly stop reading it. Ashen’s project is a good stress test of the idea. It also comes as Anthropic is in the spotlight for other reasons, with its S-1 filing laying out revenue and losses.
Interestingly, the talking students are not powered by Claude. Hold Tab and your speech is transcribed locally by whisper.cpp. An OpenAI-compatible language model writes the reply (ashen uses MiniMax M2.7-highspeed), and Fish Audio voices it per character. Students also save summarized memories of your chats and bring them up later. Without API keys, they simply stay quiet.
The bigger lesson is what AI did and did not do here. It wrote importers, gameplay code and glue for a game whose design, art, writing, voice acting and level layout already existed. A port is about the most AI-friendly game project there is, because the hard creative decisions were made in 2006. What the agents cannot do on their own is judge feel. The README’s long list of “unverified” items (animation feel, combat impact, camera framing) is exactly the stuff that needs a human with a controller, and it says headless test passes are not proof of playability.
Why a Bully remake hits a nerve
Bully launched in October 2006 on PS2. In the UK it was renamed Canis Canem Edit after pressure from anti-bullying groups, including Bullying Online. Labour MP Keith Vaz raised it in Parliament and later called for the game to be rated 18 or banned outright. The BBFC rated it 15. DSG, which owned Currys and PC World, still refused to stock it, saying it was not right for its family-friendly image. None of that hurt sales much: Take-Two said the PS2 version had sold 1.5 million copies by March 2008.
Scholarship Edition, developed by Mad Doc Software, followed on Xbox 360 and Wii in March 2008 and on PC that October. Rockstar bought Mad Doc and renamed it Rockstar New England. That studio worked on Bully 2. According to VGC’s sources, the sequel reached a playable state before work stopped by the end of 2013. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser later blamed “bandwidth,” saying a small leadership team “just can’t do all the projects you want.”
Today, Bully mostly lives on as a re-release. The Anniversary Edition hit mobile in 2016, and Rockstar added Bully to its GTA+ subscription library in August 2024. The studio’s attention right now is on GTA 6, which launches November 19 (here is our guide to the GTA 6 preload date and storage size). After the backlash to GTA: The Trilogy, The Definitive Edition in November 2021, which pushed Rockstar to apologize publicly, many fans don’t trust an official remaster to come out well anyway.
The legal risk: Take-Two has done this before
Ashen’s approach of shipping only original code and requiring your own copy of the game is not new. It is the same defense used by re3 and reVC, the reverse-engineered ports of GTA 3 and Vice City. It did not save them. Take-Two filed a DMCA notice with GitHub in February 2021. The developers filed counter-notices and the repos came back. Then Take-Two sued in September 2021, arguing the projects were built to enable piracy, and the repos came down again. The case was settled in early 2023 with undisclosed terms, and the projects never returned to GitHub.
| Fan project | What it did | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| OpenIV (2017) | Modding tool for GTA 5 and GTA 4 | Cease-and-desist, then Take-Two said it generally won’t act against single-player, non-commercial projects |
| re3 and reVC (2021) | Reverse-engineered GTA 3 and Vice City code, own copy required | DMCA takedowns, lawsuit, settled in 2023, still offline |
| Liberty City Preservation Project | GTA 4’s map rebuilt inside GTA 5 after six years of work | Pulled after the team spoke with Rockstar |
| Bully UE5 port (2026) | AI-written UE5.8 port, own copy required, no assets shipped | Live on GitHub as of October 29, 2026 |
There is one difference worth weighing. Take-Two’s 2017 statement covers single-player, non-commercial projects that respect third parties’ IP, and the Bully port ticks those boxes. But Rockstar said back then that the policy can be withdrawn at any time and does not mean approval. re3 also looked like a single-player, own-copy project, and that did not stop a lawsuit. A complete Bully in a modern engine, arriving while Rockstar could one day sell its own, is the kind of thing that has drawn legal attention before. Ashen seems to know it: the README promises to “stop and take this down immediately, no argument” if the rights holders object.
Sources and further reading
- UNILAD Tech: Vibecoders remake popular video game that was banned in UK shops
- GAMINGbible: Bully vibecoded remake is as bland as you’d expect, free demo available now
- GitHub: oh-ashen-one/bully-remake (README)
- VGC: Bully 2 “fizzled out” after 18 months of development
- PC Gamer: Bully 2 never happened due to bandwidth issues, according to Dan Houser
- TorrentFreak: Take-Two dismisses claims against lead defendants in GTA mods lawsuit
- GameSpot: After angering GTA 5 fans, Rockstar releases new statement on PC mods
- The Register: DSG bans Bully
- Push Square: Bully being added to GTA+
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