PlayStation game preservation mineshaft: The incredible solution for storing 30 years of files

The preservation of video games is a topic that comes up from time to time. Not only do we need to preserve titles for future play, but we often lose much of their historical background. A great deal of information is in danger of vanishing, whether as a result of lost documentation or the closure of the relevant studios. Not everything will be available for future historians seeking to understand how this century’s entertainment was created and produced. But Sony has launched an initiative to preserve as much of its legacy as possible.

Not just code: everything that went into a game

During the Game Developers Conference, the company detailed its PlayStation Studios Vault project as part of its efforts to preserve video games. This digital vault stores hundreds of millions of files representing 30 years of development, organized in servers with high-speed SSD storage. Developers can upload their files to this system, while Sony guarantees “cold storage” to ensure long-term data integrity. According to the company, “The only people at PlayStation who have access to this material are the IP preservation team and a few members of IT who help us manage the infrastructure.

“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. “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.”

Could this vault open to the public when the copyright expires?

“Unfortunately, probably not,” Fredley replied during the Q&A session. “It’s probably always going to 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.”

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