Developer Dhaiwat says he has ported EA Sports Cricket 07, the 2006 PC game, into Unreal Engine 5, keeping its original gameplay while giving it modern graphics. He shared two clips on X at 02:08 UTC on 10 November, writing that he had “somehow managed to port over a 2006 cricket game into unreal engine 5”. He also asked fans to reply if they wanted to help him playtest it, with a warning to “expect a lot of bugs”. By Tuesday morning, the post had passed 30,000 views and drawn more than 100 replies.
The Unreal Engine project has moved remarkably quickly. Dhaiwat said it had been “a bare skeleton less than a week ago”. His first update came at 22:45 UTC on 3 November, when he wrote that he had “just played one ball” of the game in the engine. The new clips show a two-over exhibition between India and England at Lord’s. One frame shows England’s Steve Harmison bowling to an Indian batter with an invented name, a quirk of a game that licensed only four national teams.
Dhaiwat has been open about what still holds the visuals back. In a reply to one fan, he said the limit “is still assets”, meaning the player models and kits, and that it “will look 100x better once those are remastered”. He also told another user that this version is “a desktop game for mac and windows”, unlike his earlier browser port. He has not said how playtesters will get access, or whether the Unreal Engine build will be released publicly.
How Dhaiwat first got Cricket 07 running in a browser
The Unreal Engine project grew out of a browser port that spread widely in October. On 20 October, Dhaiwat shared a version of Cricket 07 with “an online multiplayer mode” that needed nothing more than a web browser. That post has since passed 2.1 million views and 14,000 likes. On 29 October, he said more than 50,000 recent online matches had been played on it.
He explained the method when he released the code on 22 October. Rather than running the game in an emulator, he took the original 2006 Windows executable and statically recompiled it into C, then wrote a small layer to stand in for the Windows functions the game expects. The game’s Direct3D 8 graphics calls were translated to WebGPU, and the whole program was compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten. Online matches run on netplay over WebSockets, with one Cloudflare Durable Object handling each room.
The project’s GitHub repository now counts 31,547 translated functions and about 1.3 million instructions. Those figures are up from the roughly 20,000 functions and one million instructions he described in October. Dhaiwat has credited Anthropic’s Claude with helping him build the port. On 19 October, he released retro-port, a Claude Code skill that applies the same approach to Windows games from about 1999 to 2008. Its guide lists Cricket 07 and Rugby 06 among the games ported with it.
Why Cricket 07 still has a following 20 years on
Cricket 07 was developed by HB Studios with EA Canada and published by EA Sports for Windows and PlayStation 2. It was released in Australia on 16 November 2006 and in Europe ten days later. Richie Benaud and Mark Nicholas provided the commentary, and the game included modes based on the 2005 and 2006 to 2007 Ashes series. It was also the last EA Sports cricket game released for consoles or Windows, with only mobile titles following in 2009 and 2010.
The licensing gaps helped give the game a long second life. Only Australia, England, South Africa and New Zealand came with real player names and kits, so fans spent years making rosters, kits and patches for every other side. The PC modding community was still active well over a decade after release, and Dhaiwat joked on 7 November that the game’s “generic doofus names are now legendary gaming lore”. HB Studios, which is based in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, was bought by 2K in March 2021 and now makes the PGA Tour 2K series.
Why Cricket 07 fan ports sit in a legal grey area
Dhaiwat has been careful about one thing from the start, which is that he does not hand out the game itself. His browser port’s documentation says that “this repo has no game files and no game code, so you need your own copy of the game”. The retro-port guide also tells users to work only with copies they own, and to keep finished ports private for themselves and other owners. When he first showed the game in a browser on 16 October, he added “pls dont sue me EA”.
EA had not commented publicly on either the browser port or the Unreal Engine version at the time of writing. Other publishers have been less patient with similar projects. Activision sent DMCA notices over AI-built Call of Duty browser ports in October, days after a GTA 5 browser port appeared and then went offline. A fan port of Black Ops 1 Zombies also landed in browsers in October, without any involvement from Activision or Treyarch.
For Cricket 07 players, the Unreal Engine version is still at the testing stage rather than a release. Dhaiwat has not given a date for a wider build, and he has not shared a playtest sign-up beyond the replies to his post. His browser port remains on GitHub, where its documentation still requires players to supply their own copy of the 2006 game.
