These games will disappear one day. He collected half a petabyte of them to save them
We live in times when the concept of owning games is very blurred. One day we have them, the next day we don’t. One of the game “conservators” took on an important mission – archiving every game released on PlayStation in history.
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Archiving games is an important mission
Garret Fredley, together with several colleagues, archives data related to video games. He heads the PS Studios IP Preservation Team, a dedicated Sony studio that backs up games from all PlayStation consoles, from PS1 to PS5.
Fredley not only archives games, but also source code, technical documentation and original graphics files. Recently, it was him and his team they have reached the threshold of half a petabyte of archived datai.e. over 500 terabytes. “It’s strange to look at this number knowing how much modern AAA games can occupy. It’s a real honor to be able to contribute to the archiving of all these titles, but copying hundreds of millions of files is a very time-consuming task,” wrote Fredley on X (formerly: Twitter).
However, thanks to this careful work, in the future we will avoid a situation where some games cannot be re-released because the source code has been lost.Thanks to Fredley and his team, Sony will be able to republish any games with ease, having the full source code, original graphics files and all other digital assets for them.
The 500 TB, or half a petabyte, of data that Fredley’s team archived is just the beginning, and his work is a constant process and who knows how much archival material they will collect in a few years.
