Game engine recreation is a denomination for game engines that are clones of the original game engine binary that came with the video games. The main motivation behind such a project is the wish to play the game on other operating systems than those supported by the original game engine.
In most cases a clone is made by reverse engineering the original executable, but occasionally, as was the case with some of the engines in ScummVM, the original developers have helped the projects by supplying the original source code—those are so-called source ports.