Games are this interesting medium of art where they're really not easily replicated, but very easy duplicated. There's practically no equivalent to a cover for a song that exists for a game. You can distribute a ROM, maybe swap some assets, but the code only exists in the binary it was compiled to. It was only up until recently (with decompilations) that a game was effectively set in stone unless it was open-sourced.

I don't know. I think it's silly for decades-old-games to run into licensing issues when trying to go open source. The tech is effectively obsolete except in the instance of that specific game.