AI game mashups: Minecraft running inside Elden Ring

A video of Spider-Man swinging between the buildings of Gotham, another of Minecraft blocks being built in front of an Elden Ring boss. Since 27 September 2026, these clips have been piling up online, and the same question keeps coming back: how can one game run inside another? Here is what I found.

A clever collage, not a merger

The most common technique doesn’t really mix the code of the two games. It runs both at the same time. A small program acts as a bridge: on every frame, it passes the camera position, what the character’s feet touch, and events from one game to the other. The image from game A is then cut out and pasted into game B’s image, with depth handling so that a wall in the second game can hide the first. It’s a very elaborate green screen.

The Minecraft character is therefore never really inside Elden Ring. It’s placed on top of it, and its actions are synced with the scene. The AI models mostly come in upstream, to decompile the games and write the glue between them. The tools cited are Claude Opus 5.5 (credited on several projects), OpenAI’s Codex and DeepSeek V4 Pro, all driven by agents such as Claude Code.

Who’s doing it, and where it started

The wave is said to have begun on a Discord server of about 5,800 members, with a skate mod inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, on 27 September. Within a week, dozens of variants followed: Minecraft in Skyrim, Super Mario 64 in Elden Ring, Skate 3 in Modern Warfare 2, skate in Vice City and Bully.

These are modders, but also many people who had never touched a game’s engine before. I didn’t find a reliable server name in the articles I read, so I don’t give one.

How long it takes

The range is wide. A Minecraft mashup inside GTA 5 reportedly took about two days of work with an AI agent. But what comes out in two days is limited to a demo made for the video. Hand polishing, synchronisation bugs and edge cases take weeks.

Where to find them

Playable projects are usually distributed through GitHub, generally in each repository’s releases:

• Mario in Elden Ring: you have to provide your own Super Mario 64 file, and it only works offline
• SkyCraft (Minecraft in Skyrim): Windows, about 3 GB of extra RAM
• Skate in Modern Warfare 2: you need to own the 2009 version on Steam
• Minecraft in GTA 5 and Spider-Man in Gotham: source code only, to compile yourself

To follow the movement, there are modding Discord servers, GitHub, and the “passthrough modding” thread on ResetEra. A few precautions: fake download pages are already circulating for Minecraft in Elden Ring, so use the link given by the author. Never run this online (GTA Online bans modified clients), back up your saves first, and remember that any game update can break the mod.

And skate. in all this: ReSkate

Skate isn’t just an anecdote from the wave. EA’s latest game, skate. (which many already call Skate 4), received a mod platform on 2 October 2026 called ReSkate: an open-source launcher, runtime and dedicated server. It allows offline play, without EA’s servers, and the installation of custom maps.

On multiplayer, there are Steam lobbies for up to 32 players (public or by code), a dedicated-server browser, proximity voice chat, groups and modes such as Jam, Spot Battle and S.K.A.T.E. To play on a custom map, everyone has to have the same mods as the host. The response was immediate: close to 2,900 members on the Discord on launch evening, more than 3,400 the next day, and over 19,000 on 5 October according to the community site skatemods.

The maps that work

Thirteen mods were already published on Thunderstore on the first day. Here are the ones that come up most:

• The full Skate 3 map, ported by zeex64: the most downloaded mod on day one, over 750 times in twenty-four hours
• New San Vanelona, the city from skate 2, ported by brassy
• Losal Streets, coming from Skater XL, by TeamMeebs
• Desert Springs, a BMX Streets map ported by memori
• Shred Cavern and The Lost Loop, two original creations by Yaky, known in the Skater XL scene
• Warehouse Park, by SunJay, and DM Jumpline, a jump course by Nakas

And a few jokes: gm_mcdonalds, from Garry’s Mod (crowkrow), and Grind, a multiplayer map from Black Ops 2 adapted by relsmodding. I haven’t found a source citing a Skate 1 map so far, so I won’t claim one.

The maps are built with ReSkate Studio, the team’s tool. Guides, downloads and the wiki are on skatemods.com and reskate.wiki, and the code is on GitHub (Dingo-Shenanigans/ReSkate). Same precaution as above: use the official links.

Part of the modding scene is furious

Discount Mods, who works on Kingdom Hearts, said that if this is the future of modding, it may be his last project: he doesn’t want to be part of an “AI slop factory”. The developer Kran uses AI himself for modding, but criticises these videos for harvesting clicks with minimal creative work. DarioSamo, who leads a Banjo-Kazooie port, considers the practice disrespectful and talks about a race to the bottom.

Their complaint fits the rest: choosing two games is an idea, not a piece of work. But some of these projects remain fascinating to read, because they show how you make two programs that have never met talk to each other.