Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today
You’d think this sort of thing would be a problem of the 90s or early 2000s, but I’d bet you there are any number of companies with similar situations today.
For reference, Perforce was released in 1995, Subversion in 2000, git in 2005. RCS existed, but only in the Unix world.
The funny thing about CVS and Subversion is that they were last version control systems that non-programmers could actually use. TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN were easy enough that with a lot of training you could get technical writers or artists to use it too. Valuable for game projects. With git, forget about it. It can't even handle binary files well.
Only Git had the brain damage to take the source control idea of "there are two areas: working or committed" and add the dumbass index/staging/stash areas that confuse the hell out of everything.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/d...