[user3359]

IIRC from developer stories from this era, things had to be done "creatively" to save space, and ensure optimal runtime execution. Certain platforms may well have had undocumented bugs and platform-specific optimizations that you simply had to adapt to.

Archiving wasn't a consideration - launching a playable game that would pay the salaries and lead to future projects was.

We take for granted that websites but in 95 are still more or less viewable in their original format today, but that's because things are designed that way. Gaming platforms were more or less abandoned entirely and rewritten - I might be wrong here but games from PlayStation 1 are not playable on PlayStation 4 are they?

[agumonkey]

It's a fair point. See emulated snes games that fail on some vfx because code relied on ultra specific hardware architecture.

[techopoly]

Correct, PS1 games are not playable on PS4.

[danShumway]

Yes and no. I don't really have a justification for saying this because I was never working in that environment, but I don't think the industry spent enough time thinking about how their games would be played in the future and I suspect that a lot of the "well, the platforms required us to do this" is an excuse.

Yes, there are platform-specific quirks and bugs and stuff to work around, but say you're taking advantage of a console specific hack -- well, is that hack encapsulated? Is that hack mentioned anywhere in your internal documentation? Do you have internal documentation? I think you're mostly right that the thought was, "why would we care about building a game that runs on PS2, we'll just make a new game for that console."

You can do a lot with even really bad source code if the other stuff is good -- if you still have uncompressed assets, or your build process isn't completely reliant on some weird third-party proprietary dev kit. Bear in mind that with this project, they didn't even have access to the source code, and they had to manually decode 3D mesh data. So platform-specific logic was the least of their problems.

I suspect that part of that is that the games industry is just really young. And maybe some people were yelling about archival back then, but there weren't any real tangible consequences. Now that remasters are a big thing, you've got situations like this, where companies want to leverage old IPs and are suddenly realizing that doing that is twice as complicated as it should be.

[wild_preference]

It just sounds like you underestimate the difficulty of building games and, especially, overestimate the certainly that they will be successful.

It’s easy to preach how software should be written in the hindsight of a successful project that you had zero stake in. I doubt the developers of games that flop (so, most of them) wish they’d spent more time and money ensuring their unwanted flop of a game was easier to archive.

[danShumway]

Architecture is the last step in this process. The low hanging fruit is "do you still have your source code and original assets? Is any of it documented?"

Nobody will ever know if the original code for Crash Bandicoot was written well or not, because in all likelyhood nobody has it anymore. And I don't think you can chock that up to, "well, developing games is hard." We can debate whether or not it's possible to release a game with readable source code, but if that was the only problem the games industry had with archival, I wouldn't honestly have much to complain about.

The sort of second problem I have with this is the idea that flops aren't worth archiving. I want flopped games to be archivable. If you're a studio and you're saying, "we don't have time to worry about this", fine, that's your choice. What I'm advocating is that preserving history is important, not just for Mario, but also for games like ET. I want people in the future to be able to play your failed games.

Of course caring about archival makes developing games harder, just like caring about accessibility does, and just like caring about framerate does, and just like caring about localization does. These are all different concerns that we try to balance, and widely the games industry has decided that archival is not a concern that it cares about balancing.

[dmbaggett]

Well I know, because I wrote (approximately) half of it. :) It was written well in that it was a technically innovative and beautiful game that pushed the boundaries of the PS1 hardware. It was written well in that the shipped code didn't crash or have horrible show-stopping problems. (This was important because there were no streamed patches back in the days of physical media.)

But it was absolutely not written well from the standpoint of maintainability, abstraction, documentation, testability, etc. This is partly due to the insane time constraints we were under, partly due to the primitive nature of the development tools at the time, and partly due to the intrinsically low-abstraction methods required to achieve the necessary performance -- e.g., the entire renderer and collision detection system were written in MIPS assembly (by me).

[techopoly]

You wrote the Crash Bandicoot collision detection in MIPS? You deserve a medal.

[danShumway]

:) I like Hackernews a lot sometimes.

[dkersten]

> The sort of second problem I have with this is the idea that flops aren't worth archiving.

So many game companies go out of business after a flopped game (hell, even seemingly successful companies like Telltale Games are going out of business) that I doubt anyone has the energy to care about archival in this instance.

> Of course caring about archival makes developing games harder, just like caring about accessibility does, and just like caring about framerate does, and just like caring about localization does.

The difference is that these other things help them meet business goals while archival only becomes important years down the line, when the company may not even exist anymore. The games industry is already notorious for incredibly long hours and crunch time, how can you expect these people to give up even more time?

[gmueckl]

Besides, there are often no entities who can legally keep archives of the work done at a studio when it is closed down.

Publishers should institute a rule for their own sake that says that the deliverable must not only be the full game but also all source files in editable format, including proprietary tools as well as an image of a build server capable of producing a running product when follwing a documented sequence of instructions. But this will likely cause legal trouble when third party engines and tools are involved. I guess this also needs a cultural change in the wohle industry.

[dkersten]

That’s a very good point. Yes, it would be incredible if publishers would take archival on and have code + source assets as part of the deliverables.

[mrob]

>I suspect that part of that is that the games industry is just really young.

And ignoring archival happened before in another young industry. The majority of silent films are lost. From Wikipedia: "Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost, and the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever." I don't think it's surprising that the game industry acts the same way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film