As someone who was a video game developer in a past life, you are right about spaghetti code. Video games past were move fast, break everything. Hacks on hacks.

As someone who was a video game developer in a past life, you are right about spaghetti code. Video games past were move fast, break everything. Hacks on hacks. And as soon as a game was out the door it was forgotten about. A build system would stay around only as long as it was needed to write any critical patches. You'd be straight into another game, and you would go buy a whole new set of dev machines for the entire team because the ones you started the last game with are now horribly out of date. The old ones with all the source code on would get sold or given away to staff to reuse at home. And the central backup tape would eventually get lost or reused. The fact that source code to 90s games like Wipeout sometimes appears out of nowhere is awesome. I think one of the only times you'll see that is if a developer burned off a copy of the source to keep for himself. I know I did that to use for personal projects and future resumes. But those discs are long gone.