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

> can they not somehow extract it from an existing copy or disc of said game?

The disc generally does not contain source code, only the binary machine code. You can’t recover the original source from that, because information is lost in the compilation process.

With a lot of effort, it is possible to reverse-engineer the machine code back into usable code. What you end up with is not the same as the original source code though.