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?
You can. It’s called decompiling. Problem is you lose all the human friendly metadata that was in the original source code, meaning comments, variable names, certain code structures are lost forever because it was deleted in the compilation process. There are tools to help you reintroduce that stuff by going through the variables and trying to make sense out of what they were for but it’s super tedious. With new ai tech that can certainly be improved with AI guessing what they were for but you’ll never get the original meta data back.
Also if the code was run through an optimizer (which all modern games should be) the code is even harder to make sense of as it doesn’t necessarily have the same structure and the same variables as the original code
This is also very similar to if they ran the source code through an obfuscation tool. Some people do this with chrome extensions. Since they need to give you the source code for it to work on your machine they just change the variables to a, b, c, d and route things though unneeded functions so you don’t know why anything is happening.