Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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).

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

:) I like Hackernews a lot sometimes.

> 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?

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.

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.

With remasters of old titles now being economically viable, the necessary incentives for publishers are becoming real.

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