I’m surprised the game companies themselves aren’t interested in these projects.

Seems like easy money to just decompile a retro game, add some quality of life improvements and stick it on steam.

Are their hands tied by legal or what other factors are preventing this?

> Are their hands tied by legal

Yes.

Even if you're the owner of the game, the contracts for the voice actors, motion capture, models, etc. frequently define very narrow terms of usage. Defining the exact release platforms is common. Not to mention profit sharing if the actors or studios you're hiring are popular.

It's even worse for retro games. Many times the original rights holder went out of business, sold their rights, died, or something else that muddies the ownership chain.

Yes many games are caught up in IP hell.

Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like film or games, the effect on artists or designers can be pretty depressing.

So yes, games are not unique in this way. I am hopeful in the optimistic future case where LLMs lead to lower barriers to entry, UBI, and so forth that copyright essentially disappears, or at the very least is severely reformed.

Many things should simply enter the public domain at a far more accelerated rate.

I don't know how they made it, but there was a GoldenEye made for Xbox 360 that seems to only update the UI. The controls are maybe a little different, but you can swap between original and updated renderer in game. Anyway, they couldn't ship in the end due to legal stuff.