Imagine a vault so massive it stores over 200 million files, dating back more than 30 years. This is the reality of the PlayStation Studios Vault, a project that’s been years in the making. At the Game Developers Conference, Sony revealed the inner workings of this ambitious endeavor.
The vault is essentially a digital mine, filled with treasures from PlayStation’s past. From documents to sound resources and prototype data, it’s all here. Senior engineer Garrett Fredley explains that this is a one-stop shop for PlayStation’s 30-year history.
So, where does all this data live? Two secure locations, one in Las Vegas and the other in Liverpool, house these files. Developers can upload their files to a high-speed SSD storage system, which are then transferred to the vault. But why store them on tape backups? It’s simple: tapes are virtually indestructible.
The oldest game in the vault? Arc the Lad, a classic PS1 title from 1994. And it’s not just the final product that’s stored – every version, including betas, alphas, debug builds, and test versions, will be preserved. This explains why there are over 200 million files in the vault.
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