Bully vibecoded remake is as bland as you'd expect, free demo available now

If you’re a fan of classic Rockstar Games releases, you may hold a certain nostalgia for Bully, the sandbox game that was basically GTA set in a school.

Although we never got a Bully 2 or any other kind of major follow-up, the game was remastered under the title Scholarship Edition and has since become one of the most beloved games under Rockstar’s repertoire.

Now, Bully is coming back as an unofficial remake built in Unreal Engine 5, and a free demo is available now for you to check out.

Bully Remake is a “one-to-one” port of Bully: Scholarship Edition to Unreal Engine 5. It’s using original code, though we ought to point out this has been vibecoded by Claude, and may be prone to errors and glitches as a result of the AI hallucinating.

What’s weird about it is the modders have also added AI features to the game, such as a conversation system that lets you talk to other students. Simply walking up to a student and talking into your microphone will translate this to an in-game conversation, and the student talks back to you with their own dialogue generated by the AI.

It’s a strange addition, considering this wasn’t a feature in the original game, and I’m not sure if AI-generated conversations with teenage characters is something that is particularly necessary for a game like Bully.

You also need to use Claude itself to actually play the game, for some reason.

Bully's vibecoded remake seems a little pointless, if you ask us

A video posted online showing the remake has reached 10,000 views over the last week, showing off some gameplay. It’s still very much an early work-in-progress, with dodgy animations, unfinished models and textures, and glitchy game behaviour. Personally, it just looks very soulless to me, and I'm unsure why it exists.

It apparently only runs at 1080p and 45 FPS as well, so you're not even getting any resolution or framerate advantages over the original, which can run at 4K, 60 FPS with mods installed.

I’m not sure why you’d choose to play this over the original. On modern systems, Bully: Scholarship Edition is available to play on PC (or Xbox Series X/S via backwards compatibility with the 360 version), and it is by all accounts still an incredibly fun game to play in 2026.

If you’re so inclined to check out this port though, you can grab it from the project’s GitHub page. Obviously, you must own a legal copy of Bully: Scholarship Edition on PC in order to play it.

Bully 2 was in production at Rockstar New England at one point, but quietly cancelled around 2010 when personnel were pulled off the project to work on other games in development at Rockstar such as Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto V.

Rumours persisted over the next few years regarding Bully 2. It was reported in 2019 that a sequel had been in development for around 18 months, and was cancelled in 2013 as it didn’t receive much traction at Rockstar.

Many fans are still hopeful that Rockstar Games may release a follow-up to Bully in the future after GTA VI. Last year, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed that “multiple projects” are currently in the works at Rockstar, which could hint at one such game being a Bully successor or remaster.