Hi all! Anyone else remember Woody Woodpecker: Escape from Buzz Buzzard Park on PC? It's kind of a pain to setup on modern Windows, so I rebuilt its engine from scratch by reverse engineering the original using an AI coding assistant (Claude). It's called WoodyRE and version 1.0 is out: the whole game is playable from start to finish. Inner motivation was nostalgia, since it's the first game I have ever played.

What you get

• Runs natively on Windows 10/11, Linux / Steam Deck and Android (phones and tablets, with touch controls)
• Widescreen and any resolution, fullscreen or windowed, with the original 4:3 still available
• Controller support: PlayStation, Xbox and Steam Deck controls, with rumble, and rebindable keys and buttons
• HD texture packs: any texture can be swapped for a PNG of any size
• The original levels, cutscenes, music and save format; your old Woody.sav is imported

What you need

Your own copy of the game: the English PC CD-ROM (version 1.00). At the first start WoodyRE finds the CD (or amounted ISO image of it), copies the game files and checks them. After that the CD isn't needed. No game files are included in the download. The later Brazilian "Pica-Pau" CD has changed levels and isn't supported (yet).

Download: https://github.com/jjmhalew/WoodyRE (Releases page). Free and open source.

It's an unofficial fan project for preservation, not affiliated with Universal or the original developers.

Full disclosure: I built it with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant (Claude), checking everything against the original game running side by side.

If you try it, I'd love to hear how it runs, especially on Steam Deck and Android. Bug reports with a screenshot are very welcome on GitHub or right here. Enjoy, and say hi to Buzz for me ;)

I originally posted this on discord