PlayStation is building a large-scale preservation vault called the PlayStation Studios Vault to safeguard over 30 years of gaming history. This ambitious project involves preserving more than 200 million files and approximately 650 TB of data on data tapes stored in actual mineshafts.
According to Garrett Fredley, a senior build engineer at PlayStation, the preservation effort includes not just backups, not just source code and source art, but everything that was ever related to a project we can possibly find. This means documentation, audio assets, prototype information, and more is being meticulously archived.
Access to this vault is extremely limited, with only a handful of people having permission, including those on the preservation team and members of IT. The oldest piece of material archived so far is a 1994 build for Arc the Lad, with current and future PS5 titles being added constantly.
While it’s unclear what plans PlayStation has for all this preserved material beyond ensuring its survival, there is hope that some of this rescued material might eventually find its way into future remasters and collections.
What’s your opinion about data tape as a long-term storage medium? What do you hope PlayStation does with all those data?
They claim they are preserving it but I can guess their vault will end up being just like Disney’s where they use it not to necessarily preserve the games, but to generate FOMO when they decide to do shit like make a limited re-releaee run of Ape Escape so they can charge $70-80 for a 30 year old game.
They basically already do this by having the classics catalogue attached to the highest tier subscription for PS+.
The composer for the OST recently did studio quality remasters of a good chunk of the Ape Escape soundtrack (split across two separare albums iirc) based off the original “before compression” demos, and he also has a big discography of music in the same style.
Soichi Terada is love. Soichi Terada is life.
And this is another reason why I pirate so many games.
They made their money on the hype when the games were released way back. Make them available and people will buy them instead of pirating. But they’d rather lock things away to cause FOMO like you said. They keep thinking about short-term profit rather than long-term steady income.
This has nothing to do with preservation.