I used Claude Code to reverse engineer a 13-year-old game binary and crack a restriction nobody had solved — the community is losing it
By NeonGamer522 · ISSUE · About Claude Code
I want to share something I built with Claude Code this past week because I think it shows what AI-assisted development can actually do when pointed at a genuinely hard problem.
Disney Infinity 1.0 (2013) is a game where you place physical figures on a base to play as characters. Each character is locked to their “home” playset. Mr. Incredible can only play in the Incredibles world, etc. The modding community has wanted to break this restriction for over a decade. Nobody could.
Why it was so hard: The restriction isn’t a single flag or config file. One function (FindPlaysetForCharacter) gets called at 13 different points across 6 areas of the game’s C++ code. Patching one check doesn’t help since the other 12 still block you. Data-file-only mods fail because the native code validates before it even reads the data. DLL injection crashed the game due to thread-unsafe Lua state access. People tried renaming character files into other character folders but the game just crashed.
What Claude Code did: I pointed Claude Code (Opus, high reasoning) at the game’s binary. No symbols, no source code, no existing RE documentation. Claude helped me trace the call graph from FindPlaysetForCharacter through the entire codebase, identify all 13 validation call sites, map which code area each belonged to, and determine the exact bytes to patch. It understood x86 assembly, recognized the conditional jump patterns after each call, and helped me work through multiple failed approaches before arriving at the solution that worked.
The entire thing took under 24 hours.
The result is 17 binary patches plus 3 modified data files, any character works in any playset. Free, open source, installs in 2 minutes.
I posted this to this community a few hours ago and the reaction has been unreal. It’s currently the top post on the entire subreddit with 90+ liked, 45+ comments, and over 3,000 views. The most well-known modder in the Disney Infinity community who had his own unreleased approach to this problem commented “Better than my method… AWESOME JOB!!!” and gave me his Discord to collaborate.
Someone DMed me saying this is a dream come true. Another user is literally buying the game because of this mod. People are calling it “the best event of the year” and “I have waited so long for someone to do this, you’re a legend.” Someone got it working on a Steam Deck and is drifting around Monsters University as Lightning McQueen right now. Users are actively beta testing and reporting bugs in the thread, and multiple people are already asking me to port it to Disney Infinity 2.0 and 3.0 since they run on the same engine.
This was so far from the typical “I used AI to write a to-do app.” This was Claude Code doing real binary reverse engineering on a commercial game engine with zero documentation, solving a problem that an entire community couldn’t crack for over a decade, in under 24 hours. And people are playing it right now. I truly still can’t believe it.
The README credits Claude Code directly.
(Opus 4.6 - high thinking to be exact)
The GitHub repo is public.
The community reaction is live and ongoing.
GitHub: https://github.com/philparkinson1204/InfinityUnlocked
Reddit post with full community reaction: https://www.reddit.comthis community\_Infinity/comments/1rtqt1e/any\_character\_in\_any\_playset\_first\_mod\_to\_fully/
4019 upvotes · 5 comments
Comments (5)
FrostNinja842: We gonna start calling you Mr Incredible now
StormSurfer638: this is the kind of use case that actually demonstrates what these tools are capable of beyond the usual "i built a todo app" posts. binary RE on a stripped commercial game engine with no symbols is genuinely hard work even for experienced reverse engineers.
the part that stands out to me is how yo
PixelSurfer27: I don’t even know of the game but I fucking love that you did this. I hate stupid locking of stuff “just because”. Someone should do this for hp printer drivers.
StormDragon762: Bro they shut down the sub?
ChillScout586: **TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.**
So, the consensus in this thread is a resounding **"holy crap, the author, you're a legend."** The community is overwhelmingly impressed and agrees this is a fantastic, real-world example of what Claude Code can do beyond the u
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