It is very rare that a commercial game releases its source code to the public, it is even rarer for that to be a console game, but there have been a few exciting cases in recent history which we will explore in this post.
To be considered for this list the game must have at least a quarter of the source code used to make the game/prototype released.
This list does not contain fan decompilations of retail games, for those we have a separate page:
Nintendo systems have by far the largest selection of official source code to choose from, some of it has been leaked and others have been released officially by the developers.
The source code to Pokemon Silver and Gold were released as part of the Nintendo Leaks in early 2020.
The GBA was the first Nintendo portable to have most of its games written in the C language as compilers had finally become good enough to develop full retail games with.
Games for Nintendo’s first console was almost exclusivly written in 6502 assembly language as anything higher level would simply be too slow due to early compilers producing less efficient code than human programmers.
Most of these games have been leaked due to part 2 of the infamous Gigaleak.
Games with Source Code Leaked:
Finding source code for SEGA systems is many times harder than finding code from their rival Nintendo.
Source Code Archive : The Chris Shrigley Page
Source Code Archive : The Chris Shrigley Page
Source Code Archive : The Chris Shrigley Page
Retail Sega Saturn source code is almost as rare as Hen’s teeth, due to this fact we have included Three Dirty Dwarves but cannot yet confirm if it actually contains complete source code or not.
The source code for the misadventures of Tron Bonne was released as part of the November 2020 Capcom leaks.
On the 27th March 2022 March42 and Forest of Illusion released the official source code to one of the most popular original Playstation games, Wipeout!
This section lists all the known leaked source code for retail Playstation 2 games. This does not include Homebrew or decompiled games as they have their own pages.
The source code to Devil May Cry 2 was released as part of the Capcom Leaks in November 2020.
This section has all the consoles Microsoft made which are considered retro enough to include here. We currently do not list anything after the original Xbox but this may change in the future when the 360 can safely be classified as a retro system.
The original Xbox was a joy to program for, especially for PC developers who were familiar with the Direct X API. However very few xbox games have ever has their source code leaked.
