How do video game companies sometimes “lose” the source code to an older title? Do they not back up resources, and can they not somehow extract it from an existing copy or disc of said game?

Question

How do video game companies sometimes “lose” the source code to an older title? Do they not back up resources, and can they not somehow extract it from an existing copy or disc of said game?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In the older days, the idea of re-releasing or remastering a game wasn’t a thing.

Once a game is out in stores, why do you need to maintain the master copy?

So maintaining this copy of the source code was usually not well done or a high priority.

You can reverse engineer the code, but odds are that it won’t be a 1 to 1 copy, and it’s a huge headache.

A good example for this is the silent hill remaster collection. Konami lost the source code and ended up having to reverse engineer the games from scratch.