Old games like this have a small (and shrinking) audience of people who care about them. With Tribes 2, for example, there are only ~50 people who actively play on a regular basis. A subset of those people are programmers, and a subset of those have the time & energy to put into a project like t2-mapper, assuming they're even interested. I got a basic version working, but then Claude Code helped decode and convert obsolete Dynamix/Torque3D file formats (improving existing Blender addons that were incomplete), got TorqueScript running in the browser, wrote shaders, and generally helped figure out what the original C++ code was doing.

In the past, you'd need the stars to perfectly align for stuff like this to happen: a passionate super-fan with the time, resources, knowledge, and persistence to see it through. Now, you mostly just need the persistence (and maybe a couple hundred bucks for tokens). I foresee people with niche interests (but not necessarily a programmer's skillset) being able to extend the lifetime (and maybe audience) of their obscure or obsolete software.