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?
In: 1563
Because there’s nothing to “datamine”, as the source code is not present in the released game.
This happens because the source code was transformed in a process referred to as “compiling”. Seemingly unrelated to what its name suggests, this is a process where the source code is transformed into what’s called *a* binary, made up of machine code (bytes that your computer’s CPU can readily execute) (*).
To get back the source code, this transformation would need to be reversible, which can only happen if it maps things 1:1, but this isn’t like that. It’s like addition: 2+4 is 6, but so is 3+3. So no source code for Konami (or anyone else). Not fully automatically anyways.
You can extract an approximate of the source code with software called decompilers, but it has to make a lot of guesses, so the result is still quite far from the actual source code usually, and they might never match completely, only functionally. People need to do what’s called reverse-engineering to slowly beat it back into shape, but that’s still only going to be just a functionally equivalent source code, not necessarily a perfect copy of the original.
And as you may know, time is money. Plus reverse engineering is a rare skill, so that’s also money. Money that apparently Konami didn’t want to spend.
(*) Some would argue that source code -> intermediate code is also compiling, but this is not relevant much.
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