It's easy to look back and ask those questions, but it's just another instance of learning from past missteps. Another great example is the BBC taping over episodes of Doctor Who thinking they didn't have a reason to ever broadcast them again and tapes were really expensive, so to this day I believe a fair amount of Doctor Who episodes are still missing because of poor archiving procedures stemming from a lack of experience.
You've gotten a few examples already, but just to add to them, the assets for Killzone on PS2 were stored on a tape that was kept in a shoebox, in an employee's cellar, without any kind of proper indexing. Guerrilla were lucky to be able to produce a PS3 remaster, and that's a high-profile game that was only made 15 years ago.I think it's strange how this is a thing with japanese devs only. I've never heard a western dev talking about lost source code.
Yep, and a lot of these problems were way worse back in the '80s and '90s. Hard drives were failure-prone, floppies could be magnetically corrupted and yet were often kept in electromagnetically noisy environments, and a lot of the other options were finicky or expensive. Even if companies were following relatively good practice at the time it's very easy to imagine a high percentage of them running into issues and losing backups, or winding up with backups stuck on something silly like ZIP disks.yep. hard drives go bad, CD's, floppies and DVDs can rot. to say nothing of simple mistakes. "oh I thought that HDD was just a spare" when it held the last remaining copy of something.
RAID is not a backup.Raid storage was a thing back then too y'all are making it sound like high capacity data storage was rare or even tough which is definitely not the case.
I think this has a lot less to do with technical side and more to do with complete mismanagement and bad decision making.
Short sightedness. I mean just look at archive Doctor Who from the 60s...
*cries*
Raid storage was a thing back then too y'all are making it sound like high capacity data storage was rare or even tough which is definitely not the case.
I think this has a lot less to do with technical side and more to do with complete mismanagement and bad decision making.
This is what happens when accidents happen.
No imagine what happens when you aren't trying to save old files (and why would you when 10MB disk drives cost $1000s of dollars).
Its only been relatively recently (IE post mid 2000s) that having a full archive of even source files has been reasonable, let alone art assets.
Nope.
It makes it much more difficult to ever do anything with the game.
This was an under appreciated comment. Everything ages. Everything eventually fails. Thus, the process of keeping backups alive forever is a process of constantly checking in on your vault, testing for errors, and going from there. In perpetuity. Forever.Data loss is impossible battle to win... its just a matter of time.
How does that happen? Was game development of the time so breakneck that after one project ended they didn't think to archive the data before moving to the next? Where things typically kept with like 1 master backup and sometimes those got destroyed or lost?
Can anyone give like an informed or insider take on how this happens?
Can you share anything about "external attack" that sounds wild.So, there are a bunch of reasons for how source code and other assets can get lost or effectively lost over time. These include simply not archiving in the first place for time or budget reasons, archives going bad or having hardware failure, physically losing archive tapes/storage, archives tapes/storage getting damaged by water/fire/crushing, the archiving process itself being flawed or restoration not being possible, accidental deletions, intentional deletions to save storage space or otherwise because the content was not perceived as valuable, losses from viruses or external attacks, tools/build processes becoming outdated over time or lost making the code/assets useless, and having lost knowledge or documentation on where or what is stored. Things like company growth and reorganizations, staff turnover, and relatively rapid evolution of software and hardware technology exacerbate these problems.
Our game company has been going for over 20 years now, and pretty much experienced almost every one of the issues I list above at some point.
Means you are unable to recompile your game for lets say another platform. say you made a PS2 game in the day and want to re release it on another systems years later. with the original source code you can make some easy changes to make it ready for another platform, when you loose the source code you would need to re engineer your game, which takes significantly more time and borderline impossible in current gen games.
That's not semantics — RAID alone does nothing to solve the problems described in this thread. It only helps as an underlying part of the solution and the other parts were a bigger problem in the past
Even if you manage to reliably reproduce the structure of the original source code (a pretty substantial challenge in itself for heavily optimized languages like C or C++), a lot of the most useful information is often in the comments and symbols, the former of which is basically always lost unless the code is run directly from source (making it sort of a non-issue to begin with), and the latter is commonly removed, probably especially in older software, for size and obfuscation reasons.Maybe we will be able to train IAs to process assembly code and "reconstruct" something which makes (more) sense in the near future ;p
There *are* patterns in code after all, like in every language.
Can you share anything about "external attack" that sounds wild.
...how would you know?I mean, I consider myself a huge Doctor Who fan but let's not pretend many of the lost episodes weren't rubbish, lol.
I know, I've watched/listened to many of them but it's clearly a far cry from experiencing the episodes with the video. Some of the classics that survived would seem dumb if we only had the audio recordings, but the video sometimes elevates the material.
how does a financial institution even recover from something like that? You lose everything from people withdrawing 5 bucks to pay for candy at a gas station to security deposits, land acquisitions, Utility payments, and payroll distributions
Dalek Master Plan, Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks are better than most of the modern era of the show. Heck these are episodes that have the Daleks as more than just stupid comic relief. Look I get that their are a fair few clunky episodes from the 60s but I've always enjoyed the quirks of the early show. And I'd easily watch this over the worst episodes of the modern era...I mean, I consider myself a huge Doctor Who fan but let's not pretend many of the lost episodes weren't rubbish, lol.
Repository is not a backup.Repos didn't always exist. And re-releasing a game was probably the last thing on anyone's mind.