28 years later, Lego Island’s lost source code has been rediscovered – but the fans who spent nearly two years painstakingly decompiling it by hand “can’t have it”
Despite its limited content and tiny scope, the 1997 PC title Lego Island packed in enough charm to completely ingrain itself in the brains of a generation of Lego fans. The love for the game runs so deep that a group of fans spent nearly two years recreating the game’s source code, which was believed to be lost, by hand – but it seems the code wasn’t quite so lost, after all.
The Lego Island Decompilation project got underway in the first half of 2023, and as of December 2024, is now 100% complete aside from a few minor accuracy issues. Decompilation is the process of reverse-engineering a given piece of software’s code by hand, and it’s quite a painstaking process.
