the problem here is that it wasn't reverse-engineered, in the cleanroom sense of the term. there were multiple references in the codebase to "not simply copy and paste the code from the IDA decompiler", so the legality gets a bit more dubious.

as for why take2 wants to waste their time on this 15+ year old game, i have absolutely no idea. i highly doubt they can sell it any more to their target demographic of retro gamers, who've likely already bought it for ps2, steam and mobile...