PlayStation’s extraordinary effort to preserve its game-making history

1000+ PS5 builds, plus files from past PlayStation eras, back to Arc the Lad in 1994

A map of PlayStation’s current studios and the two vaults where their files will be preserved. Slide: Garrett Fredley, Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The most important moment during an unusual PlayStation presentation at last week’s Game Developers Conference was probably at the very end. The talk was winding down, the Q&A portion had begun, and an employee of one of Sony’s most revered game studios, Naughty Dog, stepped up to the microphone to make a comment.

For the preceding half hour, Garrett Fredley, a senior build engineer at PlayStation, had been addressing a room full of developers, press and other GDC show-goers about how he and a team of two others at Sony had been working for the last few years to begin preserving PlayStation’s history.

Fredley’s talk covered the servers and mineshafts he and his team are using to save builds of games and scores of other digital artifacts from PlayStation’s 30 year past. He had talked about the logistical challenges of their effort and the value of letting the rest of their division—and the industry—know that this was something that’s being done.

Then, up stepped the gentleman from Naughty Dog. He thanked Fredley for his talk, then added: “I had no idea that this exists. And I will relay a message to Naughty Dog leadership that we should preserve all our games.”

Fredley and his tiny team have a massive task ahead of them, and every moment like that one is going to help.

They’re trying to preserve PlayStation’s history of making games.

All of it.

They’re at 650 terabytes of data—over 200 million files—and counting…