How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it.
Not arguing with you, just saying if that's true, it's insane.
Not arguing with you, just saying if that's true, it's insane.
Prior to ~2010 we were simply deleting source code and assets for finished projects; either because they weren't owned by the developer due to a publishing deal, or because the developers didn't want to reuse their garbage code. Same follows for assets, often they were owned by the publisher and not the developer, but if the developer did happen to own them they'd rarely see reuse in future projects. And publishers didn't catch on to the value of data retention until remakes started to make serious money.
I still have backed up copies of the full source code of personal projects that I wrote 25 years ago. These will probably never be deleted until I'm dead.
1: One company I worked for didn't have a clue about managing their source code, and didn't even use source control. They were a hardware manufacturer that just didn't understand or care about software at all. Not what I'd think of when I think a professional game developer.
That was fairly typical at the time. It wasn't uncommon for a game publisher to patch their games, it was uncommon for that patching happen too far from the initial release. After all, they wanted their game devs working on something other than the old release. The patches were strictly just a goodwill thing to make sure the game kept selling.
"recovered" the source code this was the mob's code to begin with britboys
I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then.
Gone.
Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone.
I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes.
The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything.
Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends?
It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.
Our company retained the right to use the source code. We pushed it, but some circumstances and some assholes stood in the way. The business started to struggle, we considered open sourcing it but the contract was complex and it would have been difficult to prepare the code to be open sourced. We didn't have the time and money to open source it and said distro company didn't want to pay us to do that.
Eventually the company was bought by some Russian company, the team laid off, the code was forgotten about and likely just illegitimately sits in a handful of ex-staff drives.
I feel it was a loss for the world that a huge effort never saw the light of day.
Other part of it is most studios didn't imagine a use for old games in the future. So they weren't archived properly. World of Warcraft original source code was mostly lost and that game sold incredibly well and the company stayed in business. More modern studios are thinking more about remasters, remakes and archiving their work now so it's mostly a problem with older titles.
The industry's treatment of its works was pretty horrible back in the day. Not even 25 years earlier, developers had to fight to be credited in games. Lessons take a while to learn, apparently.
[1] https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silen...
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