Concept
List of commercial video games with later released source code
Related concepts (4)
Game engine recreation
Game engine recreation is a type of video game engine remastering process whereby a new game engine is rewritten from scratch as a clone of the original with the ability to load the original game's data files such as music, textures, scripts, shaders, levels, and more. The new engine should read these data files and, in theory, load and understand them in a way that is indistinguishable from the original. The result of a proper engine clone is often the ability to play a game on modern systems that the old game could no longer run on.
List of commercial video games with available source code
This is a list of commercial video games with available source code. The source code of these commercially developed and distributed video games is available to the public or the games' communities. In several of the cases listed here, the game's developers released the source code expressly to prevent their work from becoming abandonware. Such source code is often released under varying (free and non-free, commercial and non-commercial) software licenses to the games' communities or the public; artwork and data are often released under a different license than the source code, as the copyright situation is different or more complicated.
Open-source video game
An open-source video game, or simply an open-source game, is a video game whose source code is open-source. They are often freely distributable and sometimes cross-platform compatible. Not all open-source games are free software; some open-source games contain proprietary non-free content. Open-source games that are free software and contain exclusively free content conform to DFSG, free culture, and open content and are sometimes called free games.
Abandonware
Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no official support is available. Within an intellectual rights contextual background, abandonware is a software (or hardware) sub-case of the general concept of orphan works. Museums and various organizations dedicated to preserving this software continue to provide legal access. The term "abandonware" is broad, and encompasses many types of old software.