Game engine recreation

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Game engine recreation is a type of video game engine remastering process whereby a new game engine is rewritten from scratch as a clone of the original with the ability to load the original game's data files such as music, textures, scripts, shaders, levels, and more. The new engine should read these data files and, in theory, load and understand them in a way that is indistinguishable from the original. The result of a proper engine clone is often the ability to play a game on modern systems that the old game could no longer run on. It also opens the possibility of community collaboration, as many engine remake projects tend to be open source. Game engine recreation can be beneficial to game publishers because the legal use of a re-creation still requires the original data files, as a player must still purchase the original game in order to legally play the re-created game (as detailed in this list of game engine recreations).