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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

"Unfortunately, we did not have private or public symbols for StarCraft 1.16.1. I had to start reversing the game executable from scratch"

So much history is lost because game companies don't archive their assets.

* http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/06/27/original-kingdom-heart...

* https://adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/7766

* I also thought that the original Okami assets were lost with the closure of Clover Studio but I can't find a source.

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In this case it sounds like they just lost the build artifacts, not the actual assets. Although, when you read about how people have recovered the source for old programs it makes complete sense.

Without a central location where all the IP is stored, it becomes easy for older pieces to fall off the radar during company transitions, system upgrades, whatever. I suspect as people move away from large company wide SMB/NFS shares this is once again going to start being a common story. Particularly as people try to shrink their online storage footprint and move things to "archive" only. I've worked at places where I've had to repeating justify why i'm eating up a $LARGE_NUMBER GB for the last $SOME_NUMBER released versions of the product because the build process triggers a complete archive of the entire artifacts directories when a release build is specified.

Online storage be it, S3 buckets, or LTO backed NFS shares have real costs associated with them, and invariably IT comes along and starts asking why they have to upgrade their systems, or justify their OPEX numbers. Having a few TB of build artifacts that are rarely (if ever as the versions get older) referenced sits right up there with keeping previous employee's machine images, or home directories live.

The problem though is that putting things in an offline archive is just the first step in forgetting it exits. At that point your basically saying that in 10-15 years the only remaining copy of the data is going to be the git repo on some guys laptop sitting in his attic (the modern version of the floppies in shoeboxes).

I remember reading about a story[1] last summer of a user on reddit buying a box full of "Blizzard stuff" on eBay and in it he found a gold cd-rom that was the master source code disk for Starcraft -- this wasn't even a hand-written label type thing either, it was ink-or-laser jet printed and had a custom sleeve and all. How does something like that end up in a box of junk for sale on eBay... crazy world. I think he ended up not ripping the contents, to the chagrin of many (including people advocating for source archival, but who knows how many were just using that as a cover and what they really wanted was to cheat at the game), and sending it back to blizzard and I think they flew him out to their game conference as a thank you.

1: https://kotaku.com/guy-finds-starcraft-source-code-and-retur...

EDIT: found the story, and i was wrong about the sleeve looks like it was a regular jewel case, but still.

Just this past week, a number of classified government documents were obtained by reporters in Australia - in that case a filing cabinet had been sold off as second-hand, still containing government files[1].

The investigation into how this could happen is still ongoing, but the reason that's been reported so far is that someone just lost the keys.

If something like that can happen to government documents, just imagine what could happen to general company assets.

[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-31/cabinet-files-reveal-i...

The assets for all of the Infinity Engine games were lost as well...

That's why the plans for "Baldur's Gate HD" were downgraded to "Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition" :'(

* http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-17-enhancing-baldu...

Source code for expansions for Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was also lost [1]. It's a shame because it was one of my favourite games ever

[1] https://ggtriple.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/no-expansions-in-m...

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