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1. The source code for Red Alert 2 is rumored to be lost a very long time ago[0], so the fact that the Chrono Divide team was able to achieve this is quite amaz

1. The source code for Red Alert 2 is rumored to be lost a very long time ago[0], so the fact that the Chrono Divide team was able to achieve this is quite amazing. 2. The Mental Omega mod project[1] is going strong, so RA2 is still worth playing today. Hopefully it will work in this browser-based version. [0] https://forums.revora.net/topic/107344-red-alert-2-engine-source-code/?p=1047759 https://forums.revora.net/topic/107344-red-alert-2-engine-so... [1] https://mentalomega.com/ https://mentalomega.com/

s_dev 11mo ago
Shame because EA released the source code for most of the other C&C games: https://github.com/electronicarts/ https://github.com/electronicarts/ So if they had it they'd would have almost certainly included RA2 in that as well.
- swat535 11mo ago
  I’ve heard that the Tiberian Sun and Firestorm source code were also lost. To this day I haven’t found a game that replicates the magic of 1999 era of RTS..
Rover222 11mo ago
How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it. Not arguing with you, just saying if that's true, it's insane.
- dleslie 11mo ago
  Video Game asset and source control retention was _terrible_. Hell, it's still terrible. Prior to ~2010 we were simply deleting source code and assets for finished projects; either because they weren't owned by the developer due to a publishing deal, or because the developers didn't want to reuse their garbage code. Same follows for assets, often they were owned by the publisher and not the developer, but if the developer did happen to own them they'd rarely see reuse in future projects. And publishers didn't catch on to the value of data retention until remakes started to make serious money.
  - Rover222 11mo ago
    Makes sense I guess, but still seems absurd.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    Wild culture! At almost[1] every (non game) software company I've ever worked, the source code was sacrosanct. If nothing else in the company was backed up, controlled, audited, and kept precious, at least the source code was. The idea of just casually deleting stuff because you think you're done sounds crazy to me as a software practitioner. I still have backed up copies of the full source code of personal projects that I wrote 25 years ago. These will probably never be deleted until I'm dead. 1: One company I worked for didn't have a clue about managing their source code, and didn't even use source control. They were a hardware manufacturer that just didn't understand or care about software at all. Not what I'd think of when I think a professional game developer.
    - hackernewds 11mo ago
      Spite and retribution is a thing. EA acquired C&C
  - wolpoli 11mo ago
    There were a few patches to RA2 through, so the code clearly exists for a bit of time post completion.
    - cogman10 11mo ago
      6 total and they spanned from 2000 to 2001. Just 1 year. That was fairly typical at the time. It wasn't uncommon for a game publisher to patch their games, it was uncommon for that patching happen too far from the initial release. After all, they wanted their game devs working on something other than the old release. The patches were strictly just a goodwill thing to make sure the game kept selling.
- caycep 11mo ago
  companies shut down and lose stuff I guess. Icewind Dale 2 another example
- deaddodo 11mo ago
  Nobody said every copy was lost, they said the copies in whatever repository Westwood handed over to EA were lost. There might still be a copy on one of the individuals involved in development's machines/backups/etc.
- BergAndCo 11mo ago
  It was an era where Team Foundation Server was just oops corrupting entire codebases
- mtillman 11mo ago
  Panzer Dragoon Saga is also lost. Probably a lot of games like that.
- ryanmcbride 11mo ago
  The more you look around the more commonly you'll start seeing things like this. The RS3 OSRS split itself happened because Jagex recovered their lost source code and was suddenly able to do it.
  - cc-d 11mo ago
    Runescape was made to be botted to begin with as a bink to gold selling chads. Whole thing was compromised since day 1, many a mouth was fed off of based anglo chad's fantasy game. We needed another money source. "recovered" the source code this was the mob's code to begin with britboys
    - ryanmcbride 11mo ago
      ok
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  The same happened with Silent Hill 2 and 3.[1] The industry's treatment of its works was pretty horrible back in the day. Not even 25 years earlier, developers had to fight to be credited in games. Lessons take a while to learn, apparently. [1] https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silent-hill-2-and-3-resulting-in-hd-collections-poor-quality https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silen...
- jdmoreira 11mo ago
  Hope someone somewhere still has the source for MicroProse’s Shandalar.
  - LikesPwsh 11mo ago
    Forge is a good modern equivalent
  - bprew 11mo ago
    Not the source code, but I am working on a re-implementation of it for Shandalar's 30th anniversary. You can play a minimal web version at: - https://throwingbones.com/ben/s30/ https://throwingbones.com/ben/s30/ Source: - https://github.com/benprew/s30 https://github.com/benprew/s30 (patches welcome!) Written in Go using ebitengine
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  > How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it. I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then. Gone. Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone. I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes. The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything. Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends? It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.
  - cc-d 11mo ago
    Thanks for the comment, very cool!
  - bobdvb 11mo ago
    I worked for a company that built a really advanced TV DVR software stack, commissioned by a well know Linux distro company, could have been amazing. It was capable of handling combinations of TV playback and recording that would make any current solutions envious. But then said distro company decided they didn't want to get into the TV OS business, so they stopped the project when it was 75% complete. Our company retained the right to use the source code. We pushed it, but some circumstances and some assholes stood in the way. The business started to struggle, we considered open sourcing it but the contract was complex and it would have been difficult to prepare the code to be open sourced. We didn't have the time and money to open source it and said distro company didn't want to pay us to do that. Eventually the company was bought by some Russian company, the team laid off, the code was forgotten about and likely just illegitimately sits in a handful of ex-staff drives. I feel it was a loss for the world that a huge effort never saw the light of day.
- jajuuka 11mo ago
  Part of it I imagine is because Westwood made the game and then got bought up and shutdown under EA. Asset tracking would be a mess. Other part of it is most studios didn't imagine a use for old games in the future. So they weren't archived properly. World of Warcraft original source code was mostly lost and that game sold incredibly well and the company stayed in business. More modern studios are thinking more about remasters, remakes and archiving their work now so it's mostly a problem with older titles.
- polski-g 11mo ago
  Blizzard oldest source code for WoW is from 1.12 (the last patch before BC). They don't have 1.0-1.11
- Havoc 11mo ago
  Happens. Even the moon landing footage was lost. (That’s why the famous video is so crap quality - it’s not the primary feed)
- gjvc 11mo ago
  Source code to some masterpieces of 1990s software (such as Impression for RISC OS) were left to rot on the hard disk of a machine in the basement of the country mansion where they were created.
- tarsinge 11mo ago
  Back in the days there were not a lot of copies to start with. No laptops, no BYOD, no cloud servers. A developer making a copy would involve buying an expensive large drive (for the time) and sneaking it at work to steal it, not worth the risk. The few hard drives containing the code were archived in a room after release and forgotten.
CursedSilicon 11mo ago
Mental Omega is rumoured to have the source code (and all tooling for the game) which is why their mod is so all encompassing beyond any reasonable limits of what the TS/RA2 engine is capable of

s_dev 11mo ago

Shame because EA released the source code for most of the other C&C games: https://github.com/electronicarts/ https://github.com/electronicarts/ So if they had it they'd would have almost certainly included RA2 in that as well.

swat535 11mo ago
I’ve heard that the Tiberian Sun and Firestorm source code were also lost. To this day I haven’t found a game that replicates the magic of 1999 era of RTS..

Rover222 11mo ago

How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it. Not arguing with you, just saying if that's true, it's insane.

dleslie 11mo ago
Video Game asset and source control retention was _terrible_. Hell, it's still terrible. Prior to ~2010 we were simply deleting source code and assets for finished projects; either because they weren't owned by the developer due to a publishing deal, or because the developers didn't want to reuse their garbage code. Same follows for assets, often they were owned by the publisher and not the developer, but if the developer did happen to own them they'd rarely see reuse in future projects. And publishers didn't catch on to the value of data retention until remakes started to make serious money.
- Rover222 11mo ago
  Makes sense I guess, but still seems absurd.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  Wild culture! At almost[1] every (non game) software company I've ever worked, the source code was sacrosanct. If nothing else in the company was backed up, controlled, audited, and kept precious, at least the source code was. The idea of just casually deleting stuff because you think you're done sounds crazy to me as a software practitioner. I still have backed up copies of the full source code of personal projects that I wrote 25 years ago. These will probably never be deleted until I'm dead. 1: One company I worked for didn't have a clue about managing their source code, and didn't even use source control. They were a hardware manufacturer that just didn't understand or care about software at all. Not what I'd think of when I think a professional game developer.
  - hackernewds 11mo ago
    Spite and retribution is a thing. EA acquired C&C
- wolpoli 11mo ago
  There were a few patches to RA2 through, so the code clearly exists for a bit of time post completion.
  - cogman10 11mo ago
    6 total and they spanned from 2000 to 2001. Just 1 year. That was fairly typical at the time. It wasn't uncommon for a game publisher to patch their games, it was uncommon for that patching happen too far from the initial release. After all, they wanted their game devs working on something other than the old release. The patches were strictly just a goodwill thing to make sure the game kept selling.
caycep 11mo ago
companies shut down and lose stuff I guess. Icewind Dale 2 another example
deaddodo 11mo ago
Nobody said every copy was lost, they said the copies in whatever repository Westwood handed over to EA were lost. There might still be a copy on one of the individuals involved in development's machines/backups/etc.
BergAndCo 11mo ago
It was an era where Team Foundation Server was just oops corrupting entire codebases
mtillman 11mo ago
Panzer Dragoon Saga is also lost. Probably a lot of games like that.
ryanmcbride 11mo ago
The more you look around the more commonly you'll start seeing things like this. The RS3 OSRS split itself happened because Jagex recovered their lost source code and was suddenly able to do it.
- cc-d 11mo ago
  Runescape was made to be botted to begin with as a bink to gold selling chads. Whole thing was compromised since day 1, many a mouth was fed off of based anglo chad's fantasy game. We needed another money source. "recovered" the source code this was the mob's code to begin with britboys
  - ryanmcbride 11mo ago
    ok
Telaneo 11mo ago
The same happened with Silent Hill 2 and 3.[1] The industry's treatment of its works was pretty horrible back in the day. Not even 25 years earlier, developers had to fight to be credited in games. Lessons take a while to learn, apparently. [1] https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silent-hill-2-and-3-resulting-in-hd-collections-poor-quality https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silen...
jdmoreira 11mo ago
Hope someone somewhere still has the source for MicroProse’s Shandalar.
- LikesPwsh 11mo ago
  Forge is a good modern equivalent
- bprew 11mo ago
  Not the source code, but I am working on a re-implementation of it for Shandalar's 30th anniversary. You can play a minimal web version at: - https://throwingbones.com/ben/s30/ https://throwingbones.com/ben/s30/ Source: - https://github.com/benprew/s30 https://github.com/benprew/s30 (patches welcome!) Written in Go using ebitengine
ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
> How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it. I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then. Gone. Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone. I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes. The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything. Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends? It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.
- cc-d 11mo ago
  Thanks for the comment, very cool!
- bobdvb 11mo ago
  I worked for a company that built a really advanced TV DVR software stack, commissioned by a well know Linux distro company, could have been amazing. It was capable of handling combinations of TV playback and recording that would make any current solutions envious. But then said distro company decided they didn't want to get into the TV OS business, so they stopped the project when it was 75% complete. Our company retained the right to use the source code. We pushed it, but some circumstances and some assholes stood in the way. The business started to struggle, we considered open sourcing it but the contract was complex and it would have been difficult to prepare the code to be open sourced. We didn't have the time and money to open source it and said distro company didn't want to pay us to do that. Eventually the company was bought by some Russian company, the team laid off, the code was forgotten about and likely just illegitimately sits in a handful of ex-staff drives. I feel it was a loss for the world that a huge effort never saw the light of day.
jajuuka 11mo ago
Part of it I imagine is because Westwood made the game and then got bought up and shutdown under EA. Asset tracking would be a mess. Other part of it is most studios didn't imagine a use for old games in the future. So they weren't archived properly. World of Warcraft original source code was mostly lost and that game sold incredibly well and the company stayed in business. More modern studios are thinking more about remasters, remakes and archiving their work now so it's mostly a problem with older titles.
polski-g 11mo ago
Blizzard oldest source code for WoW is from 1.12 (the last patch before BC). They don't have 1.0-1.11
Havoc 11mo ago
Happens. Even the moon landing footage was lost. (That’s why the famous video is so crap quality - it’s not the primary feed)
gjvc 11mo ago
Source code to some masterpieces of 1990s software (such as Impression for RISC OS) were left to rot on the hard disk of a machine in the basement of the country mansion where they were created.
tarsinge 11mo ago
Back in the days there were not a lot of copies to start with. No laptops, no BYOD, no cloud servers. A developer making a copy would involve buying an expensive large drive (for the time) and sneaking it at work to steal it, not worth the risk. The few hard drives containing the code were archived in a room after release and forgotten.

CursedSilicon 11mo ago

Mental Omega is rumoured to have the source code (and all tooling for the game) which is why their mod is so all encompassing beyond any reasonable limits of what the TS/RA2 engine is capable of