In the mid 80's I worked for a game company for about a year (Aackosoft, flightdeck, indy 500 on the Atari) and I inherited a project from another programmer. After reading the code for a couple of days I realized that he'd been planning his 'exit' for a considerable time. The could would assemble (the 68k part) and compile (the C part) but other than that you couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Every variable was named after a vegetable, a fruit or a plant and every subroutine after a famous person.

It took quite a while just to get things back to self documenting names, after that another month or so to restructure it to the point where it started to do what it was intended to do.

There would indeed have been much joy in writing it again, but there was just as much joy in figuring it out and getting it to work.