That Roblox has quietly become the largest unlicensed museum of videogame history currently in operation will not surprise anyone who has spent ten minutes wandering its catalog this month, and the latest wing of that museum is, by any honest measure, remarkable: a working recreation of Counter-Strike, a full build of The Simpsons: Hit & Run, and a version of SUPERHOT, none of them placed there by the studios that made them, all of them playable right now by anyone with a Roblox account and a tolerance for the uncanny.

The story was reported by Eurogamer, which noted that these are fan remakes rather than official ports, built by users operating with the patience of restoration carpenters and none of the legal permission such restoration would normally require. The channel TrueSmoothii, in a video titled You Can Now Play PS4 Inside Of Roblox, goes further still, showing off what amounts to a convincing bootleg of a PlayStation homepage constructed entirely within the platform, a menu you could mistake at a careless glance for the real console interface, populated with playable approximations of games that console actually sold. The channel Bonko corroborates the find under a near-identical title, confirming that this is not one creator's isolated curiosity but something enough of the Roblox community has stumbled into independently to be worth several people filming it this week.

I will grant the obvious: there is something genuinely impressive about volunteers reconstructing a beat-em-up driving game or a tactical shooter inside a platform never designed to host either, using tools meant for obstacle courses and simulators where you become a restaurant. It is the kind of ingenuity Roblox keeps producing almost despite itself, this same platform you may recall was recently coaxed into running, improbably, on an Xbox 360 from a decade ago, a feat of persistence that outpaced whatever that console's original backers ever promised to do with it themselves.

What none of this amounts to, however, is a version of these games worth preferring to the originals, and one suspects the people building a cardboard PlayStation homepage know this better than anyone, which is rather the point: this is homage, assembled by hand, out of reverence for a library its builders did not make and cannot license, playable for exactly as long as it takes someone with actual ownership of Counter-Strike, The Simpsons: Hit & Run, or SUPERHOT to notice and object. Enjoy it while the lights are still on.