At the start of the game you are made aware, that the developer team of the 2024 release is unrelated to the original developers from Cogware, however, they have tracked down 2 former employees to help them. Throughout the game, you discover that Cogware was a 3 man team: Connor (represented in the game as Chief Wulf), Liz (represented as Stumbler O'Hare) and Harry Waters (not confirmed if/who he's represented by). Throughout the Legacy edition you get confirmation that Harry Waters is a son of Broadside Entertainment employee (the big bad corpo that's making the "Starlings" aka. mascot zombies), who is responsible for signing off on the process of turning bodies into Starlings. Harry nepotism explains why a tiny, inexperienced studio got a job making a game for essentially the in-universe Disney equivalent. In the new game you can find a recording of Connor, talking about how he went to Broadside to show off their demo, however when he arrived back at the studio, he found out that the flash drives have been swapped, and instead of one with the game on it, he got one with all the Starling evidence on. Most recordings point to Harry swapping the flash drives, because he knew what was going on in Broadside from parents. That makes Connor increasingly paranoid, until an incident, in which Mark Collins (CEO of Broadside) tells Connor and rest of Cogware to fuck off, because the current state of the game is horrible (all the spooky shit Connor has been putting in). After that Connor goes apeshit, steals all the lended Broadside equipment, puts all the evidence in the game and (this might be the least beliveable part) selfpublishes the game in 1997. The game is taken off the shelves soon after.
In the true real ending (that takes almost way too long to get) you find out that Connor left all the evidence (aka. the spooks) to his son Patrick (first time he's mentioned) and then killed himself to take the heat off of former Cogware employees. The two former Cogware employees are widely believed to be Liz (she acts as one of the few helping hands in the game) and Patrick, Connor's son. As to the reason why they have new evidence and recordings, that happened after the original cancelation of the game, is because the Starlings record everything, and there is one ambiguous Starling called
Studiogrounds Vandal, who seems to have the same hatred for Cogware and especially Mark, who seems to be helping them by providing the recordings. As to how he has all of the recordings even though he has not been there to record them, that's a whole another can of worms (basically shared memories). Nothing is really said about the new development team excluding the Cogware people, they are most likely not intended as a part of the story, with the important part being the Cogware employees.
