Developer Uses Claude AI to Decrypt 1997 Carmageddon Game Files

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A developer attempting to mod the 1997 racing game Carmageddon discovered its car data files are stored in an encrypted format on disk, making it impossible to add new vehicles without decryption. Initial attempts to have Claude AI guess the cipher through frequency analysis and pattern recognition failed, as the encryption logic could not be inferred from the raw bytes alone. The breakthrough came when the developer shifted strategy, using Claude to locate and explain the actual decryption function inside Dethrace, an existing open-source decompilation of the game. A known reference value — GENERAL.TXT decrypting to 0.01 — proved critical in resolving an endianness ambiguity that would otherwise have left two equally plausible decryption variants. The developer concluded that identifying a known output value before writing decryption code is a highly reliable approach, ultimately extracting clean data for all 41 cars in the game.

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