A one-person project has recompiled the cult PS1 classic Pepsiman to run natively in a web browser — no emulator required!

Pepsiman was always a strange one. A Japan-only PlayStation game built entirely around running through city streets dodging obstacles while dressed as a soft-drink mascot, it never got a Western release, never needed a sequel, and never really went away either — it’s the kind of game that keeps resurfacing in “weirdest games ever made” lists a quarter of a century later. Now it’s resurfaced again, and this time in a genuinely interesting way: a solo developer has rebuilt it to run natively in a modern web browser, with no emulator involved.

Not Emulation — Recompilation

The project, built by a developer going by kem0x and released under the name RepsiMan, uses something called static recompilation. It’s a different approach to emulation, which works by simulating the original PlayStation hardware in real time. Recompilation instead translates the original game’s machine code directly into a modern format — in this case WebAssembly — so the game effectively becomes a native browser application rather than a console being pretended at.

The practical upshot is a version of Pepsiman that runs at a smooth 60fps, supports widescreen presentation with the original 4:3 cutscenes preserved, works with a keyboard or controller, saves progress in the browser, and can even be installed as an offline app. You’ll still need your own legally owned copy of the disc — the project doesn’t distribute any Sony or publisher-owned game data, only the code that lets your files run — which keeps things on the right side of the line that trips up a lot of preservation projects.

It’s Not Alone

What makes this worth paying attention to beyond the novelty is that Pepsiman isn’t an isolated case. It’s part of a small but growing wave of recompilation projects working through the PlayStation One’s back catalogue. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has been recompiled with native 16:9 widescreen support. Ape Escape has had a native PC port built the same way. Even Mega Man X6 — never an easy game to love on original hardware — has had a recompiled PC build that reportedly plays better than the source material ever did. Outside PS1 specifically, Half-Life 2 has had a browser port covering the original game plus both episodes.

None of this happened in a vacuum. The template comes from N64 Recompiled and the ReXGlue framework, both of which proved a few years ago that this approach could work at scale on Nintendo 64 games, decompiling and rebuilding them as modern native ports rather than emulated ones. What’s happening with the PlayStation now looks like the same idea maturing and spreading to the next console generation up.

Is This Where Preservation Is Heading?

It’s genuinely starting to look that way, and from more than one direction at once. On the hobbyist side, decompilation and recompilation tooling has matured enough that small teams — sometimes just one person working in their spare time — can now do what used to require a proper emulator development team. There’s also a visible current of pride in some of these projects about doing the work by hand rather than leaning on AI coding tools, which says something about how this corner of the scene sees itself: careful, technical, and a little bit stubborn about craft.

At the same time, the official side of the industry is moving in a similar direction for different reasons. Microsoft has just launched Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC, and Sony’s decision to end physical software production is pushing renewed attention onto how older games stay playable at all. Recompilation projects like Pepsiman’s aren’t affiliated with any of that, but they’re answering the same underlying question — how do you keep a 25-year-old game genuinely playable on hardware that has nothing in common with what it was built for — and they’re doing it faster and more freely than any publisher currently can.

Worth noting: this is a fan preservation project, not an official release, and it depends on you already owning the game. If you’ve got a Pepsiman disc gathering dust, it’s a fun one to dig out.