Game preservation is more important than ever. As our industry matures, the thought of losing valuable source code, design documents, and artwork feels unthinkable β but it happens all the time. Sony has taken steps to prevent that, assigning preservation expert Garret Fredley and a few of his colleagues the task of creating a secure archive of all PlayStation games β both past and present.
And in a rare update on X (or Twitter), he revealed this week that the project had officially reached the 500TB milestone.
He wrote: βItβs weird to consider what half a petabyte looks like considering the size of modern AAA titles. It's an honour to preserve it all, but copying hundreds of millions of files is super slow.β
At a presentation in New York City earlier this year, Fredley shared a little more about the objectives of his role.
The PS Studios IP Preservation team, which he oversees, is tasked with establishing preservation practices for future titles and archiving as much information from old games as possible. This resource is designed to be both comprehensive and accessible, presumably so information can be called up on any game at any time.
All of this work will benefit us in the future, as readily available source code, artwork, and resources will make it easier for Sony to re-release software.
More importantly, though, it means this all-important information is less likely to be lost. Considering just how much old source code and artwork goes missing, this is an important project.
We reckon Fredley arguably has one of the more interesting jobs in games right now. While we can appreciate itβs probably a frustrating and tedious task at times, imagine being given the responsibility to archive and catalogue millions of old, presumably mostly unseen, PlayStation-related documents and files? It must be absolutely fascinating to sift through this stuff.
[source x.com]
Comments 47
Today I learnt what a Petabyte was.
Half a petabyte sounds like a lot but it's roughly the same space a Call of Duty game takes up on my hard drive if I download everything.
If you didn't download yet, that Dave the Diver Godzilla Collab is now lost to the ether.
This is a cool move from Sony to officially preserves their games.
But i wonder if Nintendo and MS also do the same...
Serious Kudos to this man this is amazing ^__^
This man is taking two of every PlayStation game into the ark in preparation for an all digital deluge.
A very worthwhile task. Keep up the good work.
500Tb might not sound much for several decades of games, given a Tb is a standard unit of measurement for single hard drive, but games back in the mid nineties were tiny in comparison to today. Would be interested to know how many individual games this represents.
And I thought the about 20TB I have is too much...
@PuppetMaster Given the random crap Nintendo has just pulled out of left field on occasion of say yes. Who else would keep a fully translated NES game that never released for 30 years "just in case"?
As for Xbox, I think they do too, but in the sense of it's almost by accident. I recall they found the old Transformers games just on an old server one day. And the HALO 2 E3 demo.
So yeah, they do, we just don't hear about it. This isn't the age of the old TV networks junking a taped episode of a show as soon as it's broadcast.
Just wow! Dedication
That is a humongous amount of important data....Hope he uses RAID π
Its about time effort like this was putting into place for preservation. Other companies need to follow suit.
@PuppetMaster Is it official?
500TB, oh damn they got the complete CoD collection!
@HappyGamerGirl using raid as a backup solution is probably 1 on the list of backup malpractices
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Think one of the GAIA subsystems in Horizon was dedicated to this stuff π Great to know there are people making sure this glorious hobby of ours (that we love to argue about so much) gets preserved for future generations.
@Northern_munkey
You forgot: touch grass π
@Dorfeus From this article:
"Sony has taken steps to prevent that, assigning preservation expert Garret Fredley and a few of his colleagues"
@Haruki_NLI I mean, with the scale like this where they hired an expert team to do it and not just accidentally found an old game / demo or re-released some obscure games once in a blue moon.
@PuppetMaster Well we can also look at the Nintendo leak from a few years back, whole terabytes of data including details on....er.....damn near everything? Consoles, prototypes, games, you name it.
But sure, I suppose it's better to have a publicly facing team documenting their work publicly so that we can....never play these games again most likely.
500tb??? That's just for CoD.......
@DonJorginho if your petabyte, then treat-a your pet nicer.
Thank you for highlighting this! That's so cool and good! Also, makes ya hopeful Sony will continue to recognize their old IPs in the future a bit more. They have an amazing history, I wish they'd spotlight it!
@Haruki_NLI I don't know what Nintendo leaks you're talking about. But if they really preserves everything then i hope we don't need to hear news about Nintendo lost the source code for Star Fox, Melee, F-Zero, Kid Icarus, or whatever.
There's a lot of cases of gaming company lost their source code for older games like Konami with SH 1-4, SE with og FF 7-9 and KH 1, Taito with Bubble Bobble, etc etc. So hearing one of these gaming company put an effort to preserves their games and gaming history by hiring an expert team is a good news and could inspired other company to do the same.
I mean, if 10 years ago someone says to me you can played very niche PS games like Mister Mosquito, SkyGunner, Jeanne D'Arc, or Okage: Shadow King on PS4/PS5, i would call them a liar. But with Sony put a good effort to preserves their old games, now we can play some of those old niche games on current console.
@thefourfoldroot1
Most PS1 games (with the exception of multiple disc games) are less than 600MB of data. Most PS2 games don't even exceed 2GB. Crazy to think how much game sizes have changed. All those graphical details today add up.
Well that's incredibly impressive and glad there is no one to interfere with there efforts
@ATaco I completely forgot about this. Ugh
This guy is like a digital Indiana Jones, cool job! Would be interesting to see exactly what has been collected?
Being pragmatic though, genuinely not sure how useful most of this actually is. Unless itβs going to be shared then I imagine most of it will just sit on a hard drive never to be looked at again, much like all the buried stuff in a museums basement.
Maybe Sony will let us play old games now? π
@FinneasGH I think if the games are in a database Sony could talk to publishers about putting them on Premium or re-selling them as emulated games. I know 90% would rather remake/remaster them and make more money but the option could be cool.
So, it must be on tape then. That's probably the best way to secure archival files. In temp controlled environments anyway.
@PuppetMaster It was a good old ransomware I think, but they got access to source code for hardware, games, prototype games and unreleased hardware specs, beta builds, the lot. It was a fascinating read-through.
@HappyGamerGirl My guess would be itβs all stored on LTO tapes or something.
Imagine to have access to all PS games...
Do you think he has P.T. ?
(And can he pass me a copy for... you know... preservation and all.)
Imagine looking for a particular game among these disks
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You know what else Sony can do with that 500TB of preserved game data?
Make them all available to play.
And I thought my collection of 130TB (ish) of vintage games, source code, firmware updates, technical documents, user manuals, magazines and box covers for a vast range of systems and accessories was getting a bit excessive (read as, OCD). Clearly I have a good excuse now to prove to the wife that itβs a tiny amount and yes, I do need more bloody hard dives.
@Andee SOLID dad joke. As a dad, I approve. ππ»ππ»ππ»ππ»
Exciting, good to see it.
@PuppetMaster After the Gigaleak, Nintendo probably deleted all of their old stuff, just to make sure it would never fall into any hands, ever.
@Sarcasmatwork graci
@Andee #22:
I logged in just to upvote that! π
@Sarcasmatwork #41: Same, hat's off
Rochester isn't NYC, though I appreciate the shoutout.
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