I just wish they would find a better port to remaster, the current one is a low resolution mess and looks far worse on PS4 than the original on PS1 because it was a bad PC port back in the day and were the only files they could find.
I'm always flabbergasted when I hear of something like this. Such as NASA losing many videos of the moon landing. How does that happen?!
Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse engineered?
to be frank, carelessness.
in the sympathetic sense, this was decades ago, wear and tear happens, and coporate orgs are messy. When Squaresoft merged with Enix, there was inevitably going to have some stuff, important stuff even, lost in the move. Even if they were perfectly careful to keep things archived.
But From their own mouth, it was just a different time where archiving wasn't important: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/square-enix-digital-preserv...
> The concept of games preservation is a relatively recent one, and as Matsuda admits: "It's very hard to find them sometimes, because back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done – you didn't think of how you were going to sell them down the road. Sometimes customers ask, 'Why haven't you released that [game] yet?' And the truth of the matter is it's because we don't know where it has gone."
The 80's was just a small wing of developers trying to put out a toy. They weren't thinking of the original Final Fantasy as the Sistene Chapel of gaming. They thought as much about preserving it as I did about preserving that game jam game I made almost a decade ago. If it wasn't as easy for me to preserve it as throwing it on dropbox, I probably woulda lost my source code too.
>Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse engineered?
It's physically possible. But the effort to extract assets, scene data, and source code and re-configure that into a clean port is much more gargantuan than using the source from "a bad port" and working from there.
Even if they did manage to do that, that's another thing about video game code that's only now starting to be less true; it's an utter mess of spaghetti code. Games weren't made to be maintained for years by a revolving door of developers like a website, and few people will ever see the code. They get something working, and leave it there as long as its not bothering anyone. coding standards were very loose
I'm sure many small intricacies people come to appreciate were merely products of rushed development at the 11th hour, with non-important bugs that just stayed in the final product. Even if they preserved the code, those imperfections fans appreciate would likely be patched out anyways (See: Backwards long jump in Super Mario 64 being removed in subsequent releases).
This problem still exists today, too. How do you know what will be interesting to people in 20, 30, or 50 years time? You don't always know that, and storing everything is expensive and time-consuming. In a few decades people will be lamenting lost media that was created today.
On the other hand, it's simply impossible to preserve everything produced. Who's going to watch all of youtube again from the beginning to search for interesting material?
And as soon as a game was out the door it was forgotten about. A build system would stay around only as long as it was needed to write any critical patches.
You'd be straight into another game, and you would go buy a whole new set of dev machines for the entire team because the ones you started the last game with are now horribly out of date. The old ones with all the source code on would get sold or given away to staff to reuse at home. And the central backup tape would eventually get lost or reused.
The fact that source code to 90s games like Wipeout sometimes appears out of nowhere is awesome. I think one of the only times you'll see that is if a developer burned off a copy of the source to keep for himself. I know I did that to use for personal projects and future resumes. But those discs are long gone.
I'm never surprised when I hear about old Japanese game files being lost. They probably kept the data stored entirely on some old laptop on a shelf after release and it was considered "done".
The guy who knows where it is stored, or who knows what is stored on "that hard drive", leaves the company.
Basically all my files from 2011 and older are lost. My files from 2008-2011 were on a laptop which my parents threw away when it was broken, my files from 2003-2008 were on 3 computers which were also thrown away by my parents.
There was no ubiquitous cloud storage back then so most is gone, for basically no real reason.