OWI created a game. And like many other companies, they did it themselves without using other's efforts.
That implies they had to create representations for things like sprites, sounds, level layouts or scripting, those are formats, and those formats are specific to the A.L.I.V.E. engine.
Since OWI hasn't documented them (since they didn't envisage modding or selling the engine at all), and didn't release the game source, that means you have the game in a hand, binary files in the other.
In order to get to understand those file formats, you need to guess, try to modify things, read the binary (that is, a sequence of simple operations like additions, substractions, etc.) and understand how the interesting parts work.
That is long, difficult, and involves much more than C/C++ knowledge.
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