The source code of the Nintendo 64 game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter happened to be found on an old PC from game developer Iguana Entertainment. The developer and parent company Acclaim have been bankrupt for almost thirteen years.
The administrator of YouTube channel SiliconClassics found the data on an old Silicon Graphics Indy computer, which was used by the then Iguana Entertainment. On the hard drive he finds music and sound files, AI scripts and hundreds of other files from the game from 1997. It seems that the entire source code is present.
One of the files he opens has the name Stephen Broumley at the top. Coincidentally, this game developer saw the video and left a comment. “I programmed all the bosses, movies, effects and a lot of other systems when I was young. Thanks for the nostalgia trip!”
SiliconClassics says in another video that it bought the Silicon Graphics Indy computers from a computer hardware dealer in Brooklyn. She had bought them at the bankruptcy auction of game publisher Acclaim in 2004, after which they sat on his shelf for more than a decade until they were sold back to the creator of the video. SiliconClassics says he doesn’t rule out finding more interesting data on the computers.
SiliconClassics is almost certain that the source code is still copyrighted, he says in a third video. He does not want to violate this by putting the code online. Instead, he’s going to be selling all SGI Indy’s on eBay in the coming weeks. There is already a single SGI system on the site. It is then up to those who buy them whether they want to violate copyright laws by putting the source code online. Incidentally, the source code may not be on every PC. In the comments, users try to convince him to sell the system with the source code on it to online museum The Internet Archive.