I’ve heard many times that the reason the Silent Hill remaster collection didn’t turn out so well was because Konami lost the original source code and had to re-create it. But I don’t understand how that is possible. If they were selling copies of Silent Hill, why couldn’t they just take a single disk of it and datamine the source code off of it? How could they possess the game without possessing the game’s source code?
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It is either difficult or in many cases, impossible to reverse engineer source code from compiled code. You can have variable names jumbled up to the point where you don’t know what the original code is doing. This addresses your second question. Many others have commented on this correctly.
For your first question, what is also missing is the concept of backing up the source code in another system automatically. Version control systems have been around for many years (logging changes from one version to another like with SVN and now more commonly, git), but automatically storing these changes in a another system has only been more recent. These are often in “the cloud,” or computers that are usually nowhere near you and backed up constantly. The individual codebases are referred to as “repositories” or “repos.” You have Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab storing these repos online, making losing source code extremely unlikely to happen. Those types of automated systems weren’t readily available back then or may not have been used as widely in practice.
Many companies relied on an overworked, usually fat but good-natured person manually backing up systems to “tape drives” onsite. Sometimes even scheduling these tasks can involve human error. These cloud-based systems brought an immense amount of value to the background of many companies.
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