Introduction to Sony’s Preservation Efforts

Back in 2022, Sony made a significant move by hiring Garrett Fredley to be part of its newly formed Preservation team. This team has been dedicated to uncovering and preserving documentation of PlayStation’s 30-year history. Recently, Fredley provided an update on his team’s progress at the Game Developers Conference. The details of his talk were shared by Stephen Totilo in his Game File newsletter.

The PlayStation Studios Vault

The Preservation team has established what is known as the PlayStation Studios Vault, a comprehensive repository designed to store all possible information related to Sony’s game-making history. This Vault contains a wide array of items, including game builds, source code, source art, and various other files. The goal, as explained by Fredley, is to preserve "everything that is ever related to a project you can possibly find: from documentation to audio assets, to prototype information, anything under the sun, even cultural artifacts." Essentially, any material adjacent to a PlayStation studio game is considered worthy of storage in the Vault, even extending to photos of the developer teams responsible for the games.

Current Status of the Vault

The collection currently boasts its oldest item with a 1994 timestamp, originating from the tactical RPG Arc the Lad. On the other end of the spectrum, the Vault includes every customer-facing PS5 build of each PlayStation Studios game, alongside every debug, testing, alpha, beta, and milestone release, totaling over 1,000 builds. This extensive archive is housed on two main servers, located in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Liverpool, England, which collectively store 650 terabytes of data, equivalent to approximately 200 million files.

Challenges and Future Directions

The team’s data storage is expected to exceed the 1 petabyte limit of its current cloud server setup soon, especially considering the ongoing development of more games. To facilitate their work, the preservation team utilizes specialized tools, including a robot named Vaultron capable of reading thousands of discs to locate files. However, the task is complicated by the fact that most studios do not store their files in a manner that ensures clarity and accessibility decades later. Moving forward, Fredley and his team will need to address several challenges, including the development of robust indexing tools and ensuring the long-term usability of the collected files.