Games Rebuilt Inside Other Games: The Full List (2026)

2026-09-29 · Explainer · Updated 2026-10-01

Affiliate disclosure: This guide contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

There is a specific kind of mod that goes viral every few months. Somebody takes one game and rebuilds it inside another game's engine, usually an engine that has no business running it, and posts a clip.

It is a real discipline with a real history, and it is also the category where the gap between "amazing video" and "thing you can play" is widest. Most of these are never released.

So this is a running list. What the project is, what engine it lives inside, and whether there is actually a download.

The Short Answer

Recently Added

Rebuilt in Another Game's Engine

These are a different thing from the table above, and they are also the most famous projects in the whole category, so they get their own section rather than being quietly mixed in.

The projects above put one game inside another game while both are running. These take a game and rebuild it from the ground up in a different game's engine, as a standalone thing you launch on its own. No host game is running underneath. It is the same ambition at a much larger scale, and the timelines show it.

Black Mesa is worth dwelling on, because it is the proof that this can work. It started as a fan remake of Half-Life in Source, took years, and ended up a commercial release with the blessing of the people who owned the original. Nothing else on this page has done that.

Skyblivion and Skywind are the counterweight. Thirteen and fourteen years respectively, both still unreleased, both genuinely close. If you ever wonder why a viral clip never becomes a download, these two are the honest answer scaled up: the last 10% of a project like this is most of the work.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 is the quiet one. It has been going since the late 1990s, it shipped a long time ago, it keeps getting updates, and it is the only thing in this whole category that a $50 handheld can run. More on that below.

Adjacent: Themed Conversions

One more tier, for things that are too well known to leave out but do not meet the bar above.

Portal Zombies is a custom Zombies map built with Portal's textures, models and working teleporters, plus 13 perks and a buyable ending. It is iconic and plenty of people remember it fondly, and it is honestly a themed conversion rather than a systems mashup. Nobody rebuilt Portal's portal mechanics or its puzzle logic inside Black Ops III. We are listing it as what it is, in its own tier, so the distinction the rest of this page depends on still means something.

Treat the availability note as current as of 1 October 2026. We have not tried to install it.

What Counts, and What Does Not

The line matters, because a lot of things get filed under this heading that are not the same thing at all.

This list is for projects that rebuild another game's systems inside a host engine. Halocraft had to teach Halo 3's Havok physics how to handle destructible voxels, because Halo 3 was built years before Minecraft existed and had no concept of it. The Super Mario 64 project had to fit world generation into the Nintendo 64's 8MB of RAM. That is engineering, not decoration.

It is not a themed mod pack. There are dozens of Minecraft mod packs that give you Elden Ring bosses, Halo weapons or Skyrim quests. Those are good and some are enormous, but they are Minecraft with new content in it. Nobody rebuilt anything. Portal Zombies sits on this line and we have put it in its own tier above rather than pretend otherwise.

A rebuild in another engine is related but separate. Black Mesa, Skyblivion and Skywind do not run inside a host game, they replace it. We list them above because the title of this page describes exactly what they do and they are the most searched projects in the category, but the distinction is real and worth keeping.

It is not a recreated map. Someone building the Ocarina of Time overworld in Minecraft is doing careful work, but it is building. The Ocarina of Time project in the list above is included because it went further and rebuilt the items and quests too.

It is not a decompilation or a recompilation. That is a separate technique entirely, where the original game becomes a native program you run directly, and we cover it in our decomp and recomp explainer and track the results in the recompiled games list. A recomp gives you a real port. This gives you a game living inside another game.

Why So Few of These Are Playable

Look down the status column. A majority of the entries that went viral still have no download, including the most talked about one of all, the Elden Ring project.

That balance has shifted, and it is worth noting rather than glossing over. Two releases landed in four days at the end of September, both from the same creator. Look wider and the category has more finished work in it than the viral clips suggest: Black Mesa shipped commercially, Halocraft and Halo in Dark Souls are both out, Sonic Robo Blast 2 has been free and playable for years, and VM Computers was real even if nobody has maintained it since 2021.

There are still decent reasons why most of them stay that way.

They are demos of skill. The goal is often to prove the thing can be done and post the video. Once that lands, finishing it into something stable enough for strangers to install is a different and much longer job with no reward attached.

The legal ground is soft. Rebuilding a live commercial game's systems inside another live commercial game invites attention from two publishers instead of one. A video is a much smaller target than a distributed build.

They depend on the host game's exact version. A mod this deep tends to break every time the host game patches, and maintaining that forever is unpaid work.

The Exceptions, and What They Have in Common

The Modern Warfare 2 and Skyrim entries are the counterexamples on this list, and the reason they shipped is instructive. They are by the same person.

The MW2 one is not a mod. It runs on IW4L, a from scratch rewrite of Modern Warfare 2 in Rust, so it launches its own executable and reads your MW2 install rather than patching it. That sidesteps the version fragility problem entirely. It also ships no game files, requiring your own MW2 and your own Skate 3, and it pulls Minecraft's assets from Mojang's servers rather than redistributing them, which is the same posture the serious preservation projects take.

SkyCraft takes the opposite approach and runs headlong at the fragility problem instead. It loads a plugin into Skyrim, runs a hidden copy of Minecraft beside it, and has them trade data through shared memory every frame. It pins itself to one Skyrim runtime and one Minecraft version to do it. That is the harder road, and it is why its own README calls it early and experimental, but it shipped too.

What both have in common is a back catalogue. Months of public Skate 3 tooling and Xbox 360 recompilation work came first, so these were the payoff rather than the starting point.

So treat a clip as a clip until one of those three things is visible: a repository, a release with a file in it, or a creator with a history. If the coverage does not link a download it is usually because there is not one. Our checklist for running that test yourself is in is that viral mod video real, which also carries a correction worth reading, because the Skyrim row on this very list said "no source found" a few hours before SkyCraft appeared.

If you want the technical side of how any of this is possible, how one game runs inside another breaks it into the four distinct methods people use.

The Handheld Angle

Start with the good news, because we buried it in an earlier version of this page.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 runs on 39 handhelds right now, and it needs nothing from you. It is Sonic rebuilt on a modified version of the Doom Legacy engine by Sonic Team Junior, it is free and open source under the GPL, and the PortMaster package is marked ready to run with every file already included. No hardware requirements are listed, so it reaches right down to the cheapest devices in the catalogue. SRB2 Kart is a separate package on the same 39 devices, also ready to run. The download is around 184MB each, which is the only real warning attached to them.

That makes it the one entry on this entire page you can act on with a handheld you already own. Our PortMaster guide covers getting the store onto your device if you have not already.

Worth saying plainly: SRB2 is a fangame. Sonic Team Junior state in their own README that they are not affiliated with SEGA or Sonic Team and claim no ownership of SEGA's intellectual property. The code is theirs and GPL licensed, and the project has been running since the late 1990s.

For everything else, the rule is simple and unforgiving. The host game has to run on your handheld first.

Elden Ring does not run on an Anbernic. Halo 3 on the Master Chief Collection runs on a Steam Deck, so Halocraft is realistically a Deck proposition and you would install it the way you install any PC mod. Our Decky-Nexus guide covers installing Nexus mods on a Deck without dropping into Desktop Mode.

SkyCraft is the awkward one. Skyrim runs well on a Deck and so does Minecraft, but SkyCraft needs both at once plus a Windows specific handoff of rendered frames between them, which is a different question from whether either game runs. Nobody has published Deck results for it and we have not tested it, so we are not guessing.

The Modern Warfare 2 mashup is the same story with an extra wrinkle. It ships as a Windows x64 build of a full 3D engine and needs a retail MW2 install on the same machine, so a Steam Deck through Proton is the realistic target and an ARM handheld is not. There is no PortMaster route for it. Its own release notes also report a frame rate drop and a per tick stutter in bot matches after the latest update, which is the kind of thing a handheld feels before a desktop does.

Black Mesa is the other realistic Deck entry, and the easiest of the lot, because it is simply a game you buy on Steam with official Deck support and gyro controls.

The Super Mario 64 project is the one that would reach cheap hardware, and it is exceptional precisely because of its constraint. Anything that fits in 8MB and runs on original Nintendo 64 hardware will run on any handheld with an N64 emulator, which is most of them. That is what would make its release a real event rather than another clip. Until it ships, Sonic Robo Blast 2 is the thing you can actually install.

In the meantime, if what you actually want is blocky building on a device you own, that exists today and has nothing to do with any of this. How to play Minecraft on a retro handheld covers four working routes, two of which install in about a minute.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is it called when a game is rebuilt inside another game?

There is no settled name for it. People describe it as a total conversion, an engine port or just "X inside Y." It is distinct from a decompilation or a recompilation, where the original game becomes a standalone native program rather than running inside a host game.

Is Minecraft in Elden Ring downloadable?

No. It was shown in a video on 29 September 2026 with no download link and no release date, and the creator has not said whether it will ever be released.

Is the Skate and Minecraft Modern Warfare 2 project downloadable?

Yes. It is Apache 2.0 licensed with four Windows x64 releases published between 28 September and 1 October 2026. You need your own PC copy of Modern Warfare 2, and for the skating an extracted default.xex from your own Xbox 360 copy of Skate 3.

Is Minecraft in Skyrim downloadable?

Yes. A project called SkyCraft was released on 30 September 2026 under the MIT licence, with Windows builds and public source. It runs Skyrim and a hidden copy of Minecraft at the same time and has them share data through memory. You need your own Skyrim Special Edition on the Anniversary Edition runtime, and a Microsoft account that owns Minecraft Java Edition.

Is Minecraft in Super Mario 64 downloadable?

Not as of October 2026. The voxel engine was demonstrated in May 2025 and runs on real N64 hardware, but there has been no public release and no public repository for it since.

What is the difference between this and a Minecraft mod pack?

A mod pack adds content to Minecraft, so you get Elden Ring bosses or Halo weapons inside a game that is still Minecraft. These projects go the other way and rebuild one game's actual systems inside a different engine.

How do I tell whether one of these viral clips is real?

Search GitHub for the project, then check whether the repository has a release with an actual file attached and what platform that file targets, then look at the creator's other repositories. Those three checks take about five minutes and sort almost all of them. We walk through it with worked examples in is that viral mod video real.

Can I play any of these on a handheld?

Yes, one of them. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is free, ready to run, and available on 39 devices through PortMaster with every file included, so it works on very inexpensive hardware. SRB2 Kart is the same. For everything else the host game has to run on your handheld first, which in practice means a Steam Deck for the PC projects, and SkyCraft is harder still because it needs two games running at once. The Super Mario 64 project would be another exception if it ever released, since anything that runs on original N64 hardware runs on a handheld N64 emulator.

What is the difference between a game inside another game and a game rebuilt in another engine?

A project like SkyCraft runs inside a live host game, so Skyrim is actually running while you play. A project like Black Mesa, Skyblivion or Skywind rebuilds a game from scratch in a different game's engine and then launches on its own, with no host game underneath. Both are on this page because the second kind includes the most famous examples, but they are different pieces of engineering and we keep them in separate tables.

Is Skyblivion out yet?

No. It has been in development for 13 years and was delayed out of 2025 into 2026, with no firm date. The world map is finished and most dungeons and interiors are done, with navmesh work, some quests, interface work and testing still outstanding. You will need your own copies of both Oblivion and Skyrim.

Has any game rebuilt inside another game ever actually finished?

Yes, Black Mesa. It rebuilt Half-Life in Valve's Source engine, ended up released commercially on Steam, and is officially supported on Steam Deck including gyro controls. It is the exception that shows the category can finish, and nothing else listed here has managed it.

Can you really play Doom inside Minecraft?

Yes, through the VM Computers mod, which builds a genuine virtual machine inside Minecraft using VirtualBox and lets you boot an old version of Windows and run DOS Doom on it. It is real and it was downloaded over 327,000 times, but it has not been updated since April 2021, so you need Minecraft 1.16.5 and VirtualBox 6.1 to use it.

Is Portal Zombies still available?

Possibly not. It is a Portal themed Black Ops III Zombies map from 2017, last updated in 2020, and as of 1 October 2026 its Steam Workshop page carries a notice saying the item violates Steam's content guidelines. We have not tried to install it. It is also a themed conversion rather than a rebuild of Portal's actual mechanics, which is why we list it in its own tier.

Are these mods legal?

They sit in the same grey area as any large game mod. They generally do not distribute the host game and require you to own it, which is the same position most big mods are in. The projects that stay as videos avoid the question entirely.

Related Reading

• Minecraft Inside Skyrim Is Real and You Can Download It
• How One Game Runs Inside Another
• People Keep Rebuilding Minecraft Inside Other Games
• The Skate and Minecraft Modern Warfare 2 Videos Are Real
• Is That Viral Mod Video Real? How to Check in Five Minutes
• How to Play Minecraft on a Retro Handheld
• Decomp vs Recomp: How Old Games Become PC Ports
• Recompiled Games List: Every Native PC Port by System
• Decky-Nexus: Install Nexus Mods on Steam Deck Without Desktop Mode
• How to Apply ROM Hacks and Fan Translation Patches
• 21 Best Free Homebrew Games for Retro Handhelds
• Retro Handheld Modding: A Beginner's Guide

Written 29 September 2026, updated 30 September 2026 with the Modern Warfare 2 entry, and updated 1 October 2026 to add SkyCraft, correct the Skyrim status, and add the engine rebuild and themed conversion tiers. This is a running list and will be updated as new projects appear. Sources for each entry are named in the verification note above. We have not tested any project on this list, including the released ones. The "no source found" row records what we searched for and did not find on 1 October 2026, and is not a claim that those videos are generated.