UPDATE: Hasbro Wants to Re-Release Old Transformers Video Games, Activision Has Not Lost the Code

Update 8/2/2023:

In an update from Activision’s Chief Commercial officer and Executive VP of Corporate Affairs Lulu Cheng Meservey, the company refutes Hasbro’s previous claims that the code for the original 360/PS3 era Transformers games was misplaced.

“These headlines are wrong,” she tweeted Tuesday. “We have the code, it’s not lost and never was.”

In a follow-up, Hasbro itself also rescinded previous claims made during Comic-Con week that the code couldn’t be found, and apologized for the confusion.

“To clarify, comments that suggest TRANSFORMERS games have been lost were made in error,” Hasbro’s statement said. “We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion; they’ve been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together.

This story's original text follows below:

Fans of High Moon Studios' Transformers video games from the early 2010s may have to wait a while to revisit Cybertron on modern hardware: According to execs at toy company Hasbro, which owns the fighting robots franchise, game publisher Activision has lost the code.

In an interview with Transformers fansite Transformers World 2005, Hasbro execs said that the company would like to see the 2010 release Transformers: War For Cybertron and its 2012 sequel Fall Of Cybertron get re-released for modern video game consoles, but third party developer Activision can't locate the files needed to update the game.

“Sadly, apparently Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building,” a Hasbro team member told the site. “When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating.”

Activision, the largest third party video game developer in the world, acquired the missing Transformers games in 2008 following a merger with Vivendi Games; Vivendi had acquired the original development team at High Moon Studios in 2006.

Hasbro's toy designers discovered the problem when they were conceptualizing a new wave of Transformers toys based on the franchise’s many video game adaptations; when they reached out to Activision to get character models of the various Autobots and Decepticons who appeared in War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, they only got concept art, not exact renders.

The toy company had to boot up original copies of the more than a decade old games on their own hardware to get the details for the new toys right, according to the interview.

War for Cybertron and Fall Of Cybertron were removed from digital storefronts in 2018 due to expiring licenses, a not uncommon phenomenon for games based on popular franchises. But this is a rare case where the licensee holder isn’t the major obstacle to a re-release.

Hasbro is now relying on Activision’s merger with Microsoft to bring the titles back from obscurity.

“[The] hope is that now that the deal is moving forward with Microsoft and Xbox that they’ll go through all of the archives and every hard drive to find it all, because it’s an easy Game Pass add,” the Hasbro spokesperson said. “We want those games back up for people to have a chance to play.”

Preservation is a big issue in the video game community. Unlike mediums like film and music, video games can become totally inaccessible when licenses expire and the hardware used to run them become scarce. A new study from the Video Game History Foundation published earlier this month found that 87 percent of classic video games are inaccessible in their original state.