Inside the fight to save video game history - Publishers and preservationists are fighting over how old video games can be saved from digital obsolescence

You don't necessarily need to get your hands on the original source code in order to alter a closed source game. You can still accomplish that without it by using reverse engineering techniques such as decryption, decompression, decompiling, or even runtime memory editing. And then combining that with either recompiling, system hooks (such as DLL injection), or buffer overflows, in order to get the game to run your code alterations. Crackers, Modders, and ROM hackers have been using those same techniques for decades to accomplish such things.

Ah, interesting. Are there still things off-limits though, like compared to say, what you could achieve if the same games were open source?

E.g. From my own personal experience. Dead Island had major issues at launch, some totally game-breaking, and many that were not really game-breaking but that I still found unbearable. So on the CheatEngine forums I hooked up with a small group of reverse engineers who had managed to decrypt and decompress the game's PAK files, which contained most of the game's assets, including its Lua scripts. And together we worked on modifying those in order to release a community patch + trainer that fixed a lot of the game's issues, and even added in a bunch more game functionality (and cheats). I personally worked on a lot of the visual elements, like adding the ability to adjust or even totally disable the game's fog, bokeh, bloom, motion blur, etc. which were originally overbearing, and not adjustable via the in-game settings or CFG files.

Thankfully we didn't have to do anything serious to force the game to load the altered assets though, since by simply putting them back in the game directory using the same file structure as was seen in the PAK files, the game prioritized loading those instead of the ones still in the PAK files.

p.s. You may have even seen the "Fist Of The Dead Star" video, which was made using our patch+trainer... and which even got so popular that the game devs clearly saw it, since they ended up adding an official game mode in the Definitive Edition which replicates elements of it. :P

Cool stuff!

As a dev who works with (essentially, though not technically anymore) interpreted languages like JS… decompiling closed-source binaries, reverse-engineering them, making alterations and rebuilding into new binaries — that function as you intended them to — is black magic wizardry stuff. I’m astounded that it’s even possible, let alone that you can become good enough at it to achieve targeted results like these. Whenever I think I’m pretty good with computers I read something like this and am humbled. Kudos!