“30 years of history reside in our tape backups”: PlayStation’s constructing a sport preservation mineshaft vault with 200 million recordsdata going aid to a 1994 produce of PS1 JRPG Arc the Lad

During a segment of the discussion at the Sport Developers Convention last week, Sony unveiled details about the PlayStation Studios Vault, a significant initiative for game preservation that includes numerous documents spanning over three decades, all stored in a “mineshaft” of information tapes that even the company’s executives cannot access.

“PlayStation Studios Vault is our approach to consolidating all of PlayStation’s extensive 30-year history into a single location,” senior design engineer Garrett Fredley articulated during the discussion, which was attended by GamesRadar+. “Not only backups, not merely source code and source art, but everything that has ever been associated with a project we can potentially locate, from documentation to audio files and prototype data, anything imaginable.”

For many gamers, “game preservation” primarily signifies keeping older games playable on modern consoles, but for historians and studios involved in this type of work, it encompasses much more than safeguarding behind-the-scenes development materials that narrate a game’s creation and its role in history. It can also support the endeavor to make classic games available to contemporary gamers, as access to legacy assets can assist developers in crafting remakes and remasters more easily, although that isn’t the principal aim.

The preservation team maintains a couple of “staging vaults” – one located in Las Vegas and the other in Liverpool – equipped with high-speed SSD storage where developers can swiftly and conveniently upload their files for archival. The team subsequently transfers this data to the “main PlayStation Studios Vault,” which operates as a “cold storage” solution, where everything is stored on data tapes.

“All 30 years of history are stored in our tape backups,” Fredley noted. “And yes, for anyone here familiar with tape backups, you likely just felt a chill. Unfortunately, we still rely on them. They’ll never disappear.”

So how do they manage all these physical tapes? “They are placed into a mineshaft somewhere,” Fredley stated. “That’s not a joke. They are placed into a mineshaft somewhere, so you can imagine how long it takes to retrieve them.”

Fredley emphasized that the vault itself is notably confidential, as “the only individuals at PlayStation who have access to this material are the IP preservation team and a select few IT members who assist us in managing the infrastructure. That’s all. Just because you’re an executive doesn’t guarantee access.”