Yes. The game engine is the code of the game. The IP is the content, the look, and the story of the game.
You can get one but not the other. Creating a new game (or reintroducing an old game) with one does not violate anything regarding the other.
In the case of CoH the lines between the 2 appear to be not so clear - if I'm understanding Codewalkers post correctly?
"Except that there's no difference between the two. The code is the engine is the engine is the code.
COH is not like most games these days where they buy a prebuilt engine and add their own logic on top of it, often managed code like C# and Java, or even JavaScript.
When it was developed, MMOs were in their infancy. No suitable engine for such a game existed. The engine that was created for COH has no separation from the game itself. All of the logic is hardcoded into the engine, since it's not an off the shelf product -- it's something that was developed exclusively for COH.
It later went on to become the Cryptic engine and power CO, Star Trek: Online, and Neverwinter, but only after Cryptic spent a large amount of effort (likely several developer-years) to remove most of the COH-specific aspects of it and make it useable for other things.
Long story short, you won't find any code that can be purchased or transferred that isn't part of the engine. You might get some data files like Excel spreadsheets with powers numbers, but nothing that can be dropped into a game engine. You're going to be reimplementing everything from scratch.
That said, if someone wants to acquire the IP, I still think it's a good idea. I'll say "Good luck with that" to the idea of transplanting it to a different engine, but even if that fails, all is not lost. Getting the rights out of NCSoft's hands and into someone's who may be less likely to cause legal trouble for certain projects could be a good thing"
Does that mean if someone acquired the IP to CoH they could reissue a preexisting version of the game as it was prior to closure?
That may take getting NCsoft to hand over all the game code - if they still have it .........