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 source code never ends up on the disk – the compiled machine code does.
The source code is the recipe for the cake. The code on the disk is cake that the recipe produces.
You can imagine how difficult it might be to guess the exact recipe for a cake, just by looking at the finished product. A cake recipe is maybe a page long, two if the author of it is feeling pretentious. The source code for a game though, is tens of thousands of pages long
It is chock full of comments and meaningful structure and variable names that all clearly show the purpose of every single calculation, and yet the processor has exactly zero use for any of this information, so it is all summarily discarded during the compilation process.
Moreover, the workings of the game are a trade secret anyway, so all of it actively prevented from leaking from the company offices. It then almost inevitable becomes lost, because not all companies have the foresight to preserve a copy for the sake of doing a re-release in 20 years time, if they even care about the legacy of the product at all.
Without the original recipe, you cannot hope to bake exactly the same cake. You can only attempt, by trial and error, to bake a 100 different cakes, until you slowly begin to approximate the result of the original recipe, by comparing your new cake to the one you already have.
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