As you may have gathered from the list of home systems, this is not the light gun arcade shooter you remember from childhood. It appears to be a 2005 addition to that franchise.

Wow they built a whole game engine and editor just for this game, and they got David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson to voice act in it! And now it lives in obscurity

Andrew initially had a rough disassembly-only dump of the retail Area 51 on GitHub in a (quickly abandoned) attempt to remaster it. He must have gotten lucky here, or maybe more likely a previous developer tossed him a (very nice) bone.

> It was found at a garage sale of a former THQ developer.

This would be interesting to know more about. Was it on a CD, or maybe left on the disk of an old PC? I wonder how much old source code is hanging out in developer's attics and basements around the world, before git/online repos were a thing.

Is the source for the original 1995 version available? At a retro arcade it is the one game you can never play because there is always a line (harder to get a spot than Tron). I remember playing it on pc around 1997 also.

So many questions...did the developer realize he was putting it up for sale? Did he just have a bin full of a bunch of old CDRs? How did the person rummaging even know what they came across? Presumably the buyer then took this to the developer to purchase. Did the developer know realize what he was selling?

Uploading the source code to GitHub no doubt constitutes copyright infringement.

I imagine GitHub will take it down if they're asked to, it seems rather clear-cut.

edit I see another comment pointing out this has been up for around 3 years now.

Hopefully someone will write a source code review to explain how this all worked!

A find like this will get more interesting in the future when the artifacts are from the era of git. Imagine you find a single developer's git clone, and suddenly you have the full source history of the project.

Wonder how long until takedown notice (considering all the confidential files in that repo..!)

Needs a write-up about when, where, and how the media was found.

Every time someone finds "lost media", I always wonder how much media is lost to time because the wrong people went to the garage sale and did not know how rare a find was and it gets thrown away at the end of the sale.

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