Note that, while it is a rewrite, it was done so through disassembling the original game, not via a clean room implementation. I find this particularly relevant given that the original was written (mostly) in assembly too.

It might be improved and changed in many ways. But I have zero doubt it would not lose in court any argument over copyrights. Most reasonable people would tell that it looks way too close to original. And that would probably be enough.

There's two issues:

1. OpenTTD is not a clean room rewrite. It started by disassembling the original game and manually converting to C++ on a piecemeal basis.

2. As the game was updated, sure lots of this code has been rewritten. Almost certainly the majority. But has all of it been legally rewritten? Ehh... much less clear.

This sort of process has generally been held to produce a derived work of whatever you're cloning, even if the final result no longer contains original code, hence why clean room reverse engineering even became a thing in the first place.

It's probably fuzzy enough at this stage that you could have a long expensive drawn out legal battle about it (and I suspect we'll see at least one for some other project in the coming years with the recent trend of "I had AI rewrite this GPL project to my MIT licensed clone"). Would OpenTTD win? Who knows. Could OpenTTD afford it? Certainly not.

Its not a clean ground-up rewrite. They dis-assembled the original binaries into assembly and started from there.

I read somewhere that it's not a clean room rewrite but rather it started off as a reverse engineering.

Reproducing someone’s intellectual property and publishing it is exactly what constitutes a copyright violation.

You can retype someone’s book with your keyboard, it’s still not yours.

If I were to create a new game from the ground up, with new artistic assets, and not an LLM in sight, with the characters of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader playing around on the Millenium Falcon, I would be breaching copyright.

I'm not sure if look and feel of a game like Transport Tycoon can be copyrighted, but I wouldn't like to be against it.

(I remember buying Transport Tycoon from I think Beatles, in Altrincham. I clearly remember riding on the front seat of the bus upstairs on my way to Flixton back in 1994 reading the manual)

It seems you don't understand copyright. The entire game is copyrighted. Not just the specific sprites.

You can see the same effect if someone were to make a yellow short guy with metal claws and regeneration as a character.

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