"30 years of history reside in our tape backups": PlayStation's building a game preservation mineshaft vault with 200 million files going back to a 1994 build of PS1 JRPG Arc the Lad

During a talk at the Game Developers Conference last week, Sony detailed the PlayStation Studios Vault, a massive game preservation effort comprising hundreds of millions of files going back more than 30 years, all stored in a "mineshaft" of data tapes that not even the company's executives have access to.

"PlayStation Studios Vault is our solution for bringing all of PlayStation's rich, 30-year history together in one place," senior build engineer Garrett Fredley explained during the talk, which GamesRadar+ attended. "Not just backups, not just source code and source art, but everything that was ever related to a project we can possibly find, from documentation to audio assets and prototype information, anything under the sun."

For many players, "game preservation" simply means keeping old games playable for consumers on new hardware, but for historians and studios doing this kind of work, it's much more about preserving the behind-the-scenes development work that tells the story of a game's creation, and its place in history. It can help in the quest to make old games accessible to modern players, too, since access to old assets can help devs create remasters and remakes more easily, but that's not the main goal.

The preservation team operates a pair of "staging vaults" – one in Las Vegas, and the other in Liverpool – with fast SSD storage where developers can quickly and easily upload their files for preservation. The team then transfers that data to the "actual PlayStation Studios Vault," which is a "cold storage" solution where everything is stored on data tapes.

"All 30 years of history reside in our tape backups," Fredley explained. "And yes, for anyone in the room who knows anything about tape backups, you probably just shivered. We still use them, unfortunately. They'll never go away."

So how do store all those physical tapes? "They go into a mineshaft somewhere," Fredley said. "That's not a joke. They go into a mineshaft somewhere, so you can imagine how long it takes to get them back."

Fredly noted that the vault itself is pretty secretive, as "the only people at PlayStation that have access to this material are the IP preservation team and a few members of IT who help us manage the infrastructure. That's it. Just because you're an executive doesn't mean you have access to the material." If a dev needs access to the material, they get it through the preservation team.

"The oldest material we currently have in our vault right now is an Arc the Lad build timestamped 1994," and new material is constantly being added. That includes "every PS5 build ever produced by PlayStation Studios that the consumer has seen," on top of "every milestone release of every one of those titles," comprising alphas, betas, debug versions, and test builds. All told, there are some 200 million files.

Much of the talk was dedicated to the technical details of how a massive storage system like this works, but for an outsider, the obvious question is just what all this data is going to be used for. Might it go public someday, when the copyright on all this material goes out?

"Unfortunately, probably not," Fredley said when asked that question during a Q&A after the panel. "It's probably always gonna remain an internal service and internal material. And ultimately, it's not up for us to decide. We help preserve stuff. We don't decide what happens to it."

Still, there's reason to hope some of these materials might see the light of day thanks to bonus features in remastered games, or officially sanctioned documentaries – though that's my speculation, as Fredley's not specific about how data will be used, since he's just there to collect it. Still, it's clear that his heart's in the right place. "There's people who probably don't know what Gex is," he joked during the panel. "That wounds me personally."

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