I see a lot about source codes being leaked and I’m wondering how it that you could make something like an exact replica of Super Mario Bros without the source code or how you can’t take the finished product and run it back through the compilation software?
At a very low level, yes, everything is 1s and 0s. However, virtually nobody deals with binary anymore. Programming languages are abstractions over abstractions over abstractions not to have to deal with typing binary.
The point of programming languages is for humans to be able to read it and make sense out of it. It’s a way to represent in a kind of intermediate language that’s halfway between something humans can read and computers can interpret.
Say the game’s programmer wants to handle moving your character right on pressing the right arrow key. They might write some function called “handleRightArrow()”, which does whatever. Then your compiler will turn this to some instructions - read stuff in RAM at address XYZ, copy it over, etc. The original code with readable names, comments, documentation, proper organization, it’s gone. Once you decompile, it’s gonna be random function/variable names, compiler might have rewritten some parts of the implementation as automatic optimizations, unlined some functions, etc. The human readable meaning of the code is lost. It does the same thing as the original code, but it isn’t the original code either.