And in any case, there’s still dozens of communities around old arena shooters and the like. If those had an arbitrary lifespan applied to them based on when some company or other shut down, that’d be impossible.
And every so often, it'll popup and ask, "What is the icon on page 37 of the manual?" It's a cute throwback to what copy protection used to be.
But it's a bit obscene that they didn't run the crack to take out the copy protection checks once they ported it over to Steam. Once the window pops up, the game is unplayable until you type in the right code.
I was furious my first time through. I spent all night reliving nostalgic fantasies, only to get pretty far in and hit that wall. And, because I left the game on when I went to bed on Friday, it looked like I had played it for like 48 hours, so by the time I got around to filing a complaint with Steam to get a refund, they were like, "You've clearly been playing the game for 48+ hours..." Frustrating. The person on the other end of the phone thought I was a babbling idiot when I said the game had copy protection and asked for a copy of the manual. It was one of the funniest moments of tech support I've ever been on.
Luckily, I found a a PDF of the user manual with all the symbols.
Looks like there's also an engine reimplementation: https://openxcom.org/
A lot of games are multi-player. Even if the software existed, once the community dies it's not the same game. It's fine, nothing lasts forever. We use it, we enjoy it, and we move on to the next thing that's enjoyable. You can't go home again, but you can always find a new home.