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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The ELI5 answer to “why couldn’t they get the source code from the retail copies” is “you can’t turn hamburger back into a cow”.
To be runnable, most code gets turned into a different form that the machine can run efficiently. This process (compilation) removes most of the information humans need to edit the code.
(Some languages tend to leave more information than others, for example with Java and .NET you even get most variable names and pretty readable code back, but with C++, you’d have a better chance with the cow than the code.)
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