Why are japs so incompetent at game development? Who deletes what amounts to maybe a few megabytes of text files after they release a game?

Didn't they port the game a bunch of times or is it all emulated?

They also said they plain overwrote the source code when they translated it to new languages. So even if it did exist all the text would be in whatever language they last released it for.

>>712996578
Were they working entirely off of floppy disks or something? Why would you need to be so economical with storage in 1997 when the average hard drive was like 5gb?

>>712997210
They simply did not care. None of this stuff was important to them and just a job.

>>712996339 (OP)
This seems like a Square Enix problem mostly since they are the only ones I keep hearing have this policy

>>712997983
That's just sheer incompetence and malicious negligence then. What if a game breaking bug was discovered a month after release and they had to go back and fix it?

the CEOs simply didn't care
and to be honest the code engine they wrote it with probably isn't used anymore

>>712998160
You have to be 18 to post here.

>>712998196
You can port any software to any platform if it's written in a modular enough way. Just swap out code that interfaces with the gpu rendering api's and keep everything else the same.

>>712996339 (OP)
That's everyone from that age. Back then no one even thought of re-releasing stuff forty years later.

>>712998468
Back in the 80s and 90s, games were constantly being ported to a dozen different platforms all with completely different system architectures, sometimes years after the original release. You would be insane to throw away the source code after releasing a game. It would be like flushing millions of dollars down the toilet.

>it wasn't a normal thing at the time
what? nintendo did that from day 1 and other companies

It's just the usual nip wageslave mentality of being used and discarded without anyone giving a shit.
They got hired to make a game, did it and then went to make another one, never looking back or allowed to take a break

>>712998719
Japanese software practices are all retarded and non-sensical.

>>712998160
>What if a game breaking bug was discovered a month after release and they had to go back and fix it?
Then they shipped a new disc to every buyer!

>>712996339 (OP)
Japan has never given a shit about anything in the long term.

>>712996339 (OP)
Who knows? It’s similar to Toei throwing out the dbz master audio which is why all the home releases jp track sounds liked muffled shit and is in mono.

>>712998468
>That's everyone from that age. Back then no one even thought of re-releasing stuff forty years later.

Nintendo kept their source code, they were able to just make an english version of Fire Emblem Dark Dragon 30 years after the fact. If Nintendo backed up NES games, Squaresoft should have been backing up their PS1 games.

>>712996339 (OP)
i know some game companies have warehouses that stores their various game assets and data. and since Japan is the land of earthquakes, I imagine some would be lost due to earthquakes and fire and confusion due to messy asset management caused by disasters

I know that some anime production have lost its whole warehouse of anime cels due to the Kobe earthquake, even Masamune Shirow lost his whole works due to that earthquake and lost his interest in Ghost in the Shell and just kept making horse porn

Shit from 90s was always left on old weird storage, ZIP disks, old tape formats, hard disks using weird UNIX variants, things modern PCs aren't compatible with.
Most likely it's just stuck on some old storage somewhere that nobody still working there even knows about.
Even gigaleak showed nintendo only recovered some of their 90s tape drive backups in 2016 or so (but a log file in the leak showed they were only able to recover like 40% of the tapes they tried, and the rest had failed, hopefully they've brought in data recovery since then but who knows)

>>712996339 (OP)
proper archival wasn't as much of a thing as it is now.
doing games and TV shows was looked at as simply making a product and once it's finished, that's it.

same happened with dragon ball. the reason why all official rereleases of it have lower quality audio, is because it was archived that way to be able to save audio and video on the same tapes.

only fans have been able to collect the original high quality audio over the years via collecting records of the first airing.

what IS a japanese problem is companies not giving a fuck about anything that they themselves haven't done and they flat out refused to accept the high quality, fan sourced audio for future re releases for no reason whatsoever.
they also hate fans modding their games.

something like doom or quake opening itself up for fans to do whatever they want with it would never have happened outside of europe or the US

>>712996339 (OP)
>keeping the source code wasn't a thing in 1997
We have like hundreds of Japanese games from that era that have been remastered from source code, they just don't want to admit they were retarded.

>>712999128
All of those things can be read on modern computers with a minimal amount of effort and money. You can buy a usb zip drive on eBay for like $20 for example.

>>712998160
games used to release without game breaking bugs, little fella.

that only became a mainstream thing with the 7th gen when suits realised they can push release dates earlier and finish the game later, especially in the US market

>>712999147
FUCK TOEI
FUCK Chris sabat
FUCK DBZ

>>712999309
>games used to release without game breaking bugs, little fella.

Final Fantasy has loads of game breaking bugs.

>>712996339 (OP)
They did the exact same thing with FF9 they lost the source code and still to this day they don't have the code for the pre-rendered backgrounds which is why for me the Moguri mod is such a blessing, it brought them back to life.

Also it shouldn't take one of the Directors having to play the FFT for himself years and years later to realise there is no way to play these older games on modern consoles and PC systems (without emulation).
That should just be a thing Square Enix are aware of, have a guy or two guys that go through their library of games to make sure they're compatible with current systems.

>>712999147
We aren't talking about 1975 here, this was well after the popular adoption of the compact disc, the source code could almost certainly have fit on a couple of CDs, if not a single CD. This was a PS1 game, they were literally putting this game on CDs and selling it, and nobody thought to save the actual code of the game to a CD and keep it somewhere? Absolute bullshit. What almost certainly happened was the source code was saved to disk, probably several times, but the retards lost them all.

>>712999147
Funny how the west doesn't have any of these problems. You can find Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1930s in crystal clear 35mm original negative film quality with perfect audio on blu-ray today.

>>712999280
>All of those things
Only ZIP, meanwhile there were hundreds of different incompatible tape / UNIX formats
eg. frogger 2 code was stuck on some shit format that even data recovery companies failed to recover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvEO4IaEJlw

>>712996436
Emulation a lot of the time. Seriously Japan is notorious for loosing their own code.

>>712999324
wasn't chris sabat the one asked to bring the fan sourced audio idea to toei and he did, and they refused?

that aside, funimation is a circle of self jerking retards who think they are as important as the companies whose works they do shitty dubs for

>>712996339 (OP)
As much I love Squaresoft something’s were laughably incompetent back then. This and giving the Honolulu team an outdated build to make the original FF7 PC release stand out.

>>712999450
thats why i mentioned in the very beginning of my post, that it is a mentality thing as well

>>712999461
yes, preserving knowledge and culture, even if it is "only" entertainment to many people is a thing we do in our cultures

>>712999428
>They did the exact same thing with FF9
and FF8.. and FF10.. and KH

>>712999536
From what I heard he. Said give me that broadcast audio nd I’ll fight to get it on the next home release.but still

FUCK CHRIS Sabat.
FUCK FUNIMATION
FUCK SEAN SCHEMMEL

>>712999309
japanese games are notoriously full of bugs

>>712996339 (OP)
I guess they didn't have Nintendo to give them back their code this time.

>>712998081
Capcom also lost some of their data in the past too.

>>712999309
>games used to release without game breaking bugs, little fella.
You can't be older than 12

>>712998160
If this is an honest question, then the reviewers would’ve likely spotted the bug and give the game a very low score. It would ruin the sales and small game studios would close down. There are examples of old games with pc patches but for a console release it wasn’t patchable at the time. They would most likely have to release an updated version of the game to go in store shelves. The english version would’ve been the version that had bug fixes and a translation. It’s hard to think of a game with this example but there are a few. SMT Devil Summoner on Saturn (Japan only game) had a awful bug where if you max out your speed it would somehow overflow and make your speed 1, making you always go last, made it really awful to play and it was unfixable if you did it. It was spread through forums though so if you googled you knew. They released a new disc for sale that fixed it.

One awful example was the Sphinx Mummy game for the ps2. It had a really bad bug where at 10-15 hours into the game if you saved, went through a door, then died and reloaded the door would be permanently closed. It was due to how the game handled cutscenes and bad programming. The save points are 1-2 hours apart not autosave and it was a game where you had to die often to learn so most people got the glitch and it was a closed building with that door you had to use it to proceed there was no other way to progress the story. I think the game got panned hard for this. They did fix your save if you mailed it in at the time but what a headache. They couldn’t patch on ps2. The devs kept the source code and released on GoG and the bug was instantly easy for devs to fix, just 1 or 2 lines of awful coding poof easy.

Pc games did get patches. Rayman 2 on PC had an issue where it didn’t detect tour cd so it gave you antipiracy warnings with the original disc so they fixed it. Also Mafia 1 on pc had a patch to make the racing mission easier, I didn’t use that one.

>>712999324
ocean dub has always been superior

>>712999309
Ah, to be young and stupid again while believing complete baloney.

>>712999815
>>712999408
You usually have to go and find them though. At the very least, the default path was always very well tested. I don't think I encountered any *game breaking* bugs on the entire lifecycle of the SNES, but my memory could just be shit too. I'm at least sure I never had to restart any of my playthroughs due to bugs and was able to complete every game, at least until FF7 rolled around and came on multiple discs and one was broken/lost.

>>713000143
Relm sketch bug immediately comes to mind

>>712996339 (OP)
It was standard practice to not care as much in 1997 about that stuff. What western devs give half a shit about their source code from games in the 90’s? They just remake it in Unreal anyway with ugly women and unnecessary race swaps.

>>712996339 (OP)
>Why are japs so incompetent at game development?
Look up what happened to the original Fallout game or most recently all of the Transformers games published by Activision, this isn't a country problem, it's a corpo suits retardation problem.

>>712999147
Japan's dogshit copyright laws meant that using fan sourced stuff meant the fans would own things themselves and/or it was illegal in the first place for them to collect so they cannot use it.

>>712998160
A new version would be issued. That’s why on rom sites you see stuff like ver 1.1 or rev b. No official announcement, the new ver would just be rolled out.

>>712997983
You would think one of the lead programmers kept a backup copy for himself. Out of pride and as a reference for other jobs to go back and look how they solved some specific problem.

Between troonig out, getting fat and spaghetti code programmers sure are a disorganized and lazy slobs. In a field that should entail systematic and logical approach to problems

>>713000356
I’m sure my boy Nasir did that.

>>712998447
nta but I agree that its somewhat negligent, I can't imagine putting in so much work on a project and then just deleting it all, especially when there's bound to be endless cardboard promo shit lying around to commemorate the games release so it's not like it's some nothing bureaucratic annoyance to just forget about, I would imagine it's a scenario where everyone just sort of assumes it's backed up somewhere by someone but it's no one's job to make sure of that.

>>713000221
I loved that game, but to be honest I don't even remember who Relm is. I had to google it. I don't think I used Relm much. As I was only 6 when it came out, my party was pretty straightforward and always consisted of some combo of shadow/locke/cyan.

>>712998741
source?

>>713000460
https://q-gears.sourceforge.net/index.phtml?content=4

>>713000558
> I loved that game,
>Don't even remember who Relm is.
You fucking dare?

>>713000356
>keep company assets for yourself
>company want to make a re-release 20 years later but don't have the source code
>Oy boss man, I actually kept a copy of the source code!
>Thanks, I'm calling the cops, enjoy your 50 years of jail time for theft and copyright violation

>>712999815
>>712999962
>>713000075
tell me any properly made game of the time before patching was common that had game breaking bugs like making the game crash, hard or soft locking the player, having inventory or spawns get messed up etc.

and not ones that you have to really go out of your way to active that are only found years after release

>>712999783
>FUCK SEAN SCHEMMEL
based and true

>>713000982
You’d think that but here in the engineering world it’s fairly common to hold onto a copy of all your work in a personal drive even after you leave. Certainly not an officially approved practice, but them’s the breaks.

>>712999530
What is the root cause? Nippon hierarchical culture demands you hand the CDs over to the grey haired manager who barely knows how to turn on the computer? Otherwise BIG dishonoru demanding thousand and one sudokus

>>712999068
They didn't update the source code retard. They used lua scripting to update the text in view while running the game in an emulator.

>>713001109
we're talking of Japan, you go to jail for copyright infringement if you swap the heads of your GI Joe there

>>713001086
FF6 Relm sketch bug.
MissingNo of course if you catch it.

Nintendo is basically the only Japanese company that keeps everything

>>712999461
What about moon landing anon?
Where is the tape?

>>712996339 (OP)
This is what happened to bloodborne, isn't it?

Seems to be a Japanese thing not to keep backups. Japanese IT is hilariously stuck in the past by about 20-30 years. Hell even big games like FFXI and FFXIV don't have backups. They just patch over the current iteration and never keep backups of the previous one.

>>713001451
missingno wasnt discovered until a year after the western release and 3 years after the original release

sketch bug was quickly removed in 1.1 releases, although, ill give you that one

don't they also rebuild all their homes every 20 years cause muh tradition?

>>713001451
Gambit Glitch in MvC2 (among other fighter glitches)
Soul Calibur III's memory card wipe
Getting softlocked in Skyward Sword.
Pac-Man level 256

>>712999461
>Funny how the west doesn't have any of these problems.
Nigga the vast majority of silent era films were lost within a matter of years.
Almost a hundred Doctor Who episodes are still lost, and dozens more only exist because copies were found in random places.

>>712996339 (OP)
Not that odd. I remember Icewind Dale 2 was or is in the same situation.

Why is always angry retards who posts these threads? Storage was always a premium even for big companies those days and they never thought they would be making cashgrabs of their older stuff, but what you can gain with arguing with stupid people (and probably underaged)

>>712996339 (OP)
Are you retarded or ignorant? A lot stuff from 30+ years ago dont have their source code anymore for a variety of reasons. Most commonly due to space constraints, physical media degradation or incompatible file formats.

>>713002148
Bitch. Never reply to me again. Coming at me with some foolishness

>>713002509
That’s right bitch. Obey like the good mutt you are. Now meow for me!
>meow
Good girl.

what causes this low level of a self-esteem? >>713003214

>>713002509
>>713003214
>>713003580

i hate how sooner or later, every thread on /v/ devolves into shitflinging by some autistic, sad clown retards

>>712996339 (OP)
Well it's not that simple, compilation at the time was a nightmare with shit like GNAT so the single set of computers that were being used to compile were being wiped constantly to compile the next project and otherwise there wouldn't have been a single "gold" file, it would've been a bunch of disparate assets and code blocks spread throughout the office.
It just wouldn't have occurred to anyone to transfer the gold source to its own storage and they would've thought it'd be worthless without the assets anyway.
>a few megabytes
Floppies were 1.44mb and they went bad constantly, they were the most unreliable piece of shit storage you could own. Even Hard disks at the time weren't great and hardware was constantly being deprecated up until mid 00s.

>>712996339 (OP)
This is the most retarded thing I've ever read, which means it probably real.

>>713003982
Also Japs are just fucking ass at archiving in general, most of their offices still run on paper records and fax machines and stuff goes missing all the time.

>>713003982
So they didn't back up any of their work? How would they have explained to investors that they just lost months of work and cost them millions of dollars if one of the computer's hard drives were to fail?

>>713000312
That's true everywhere anon. You do own the copyright on your fanfiction, fan games, etc.
Did you think 4chan's disclaimer about all posts belonging to the poster was a joke?

>>713002038
I had an 8GB hard drive in the late 90s and I was a little kid whose sole source of income was allowance money.

>>713004209
> How would they have explained to investors that they just lost months of work and cost them millions of dollars if one of the computer's hard drives were to fail?
しょうがない

>>712997210
It's most likely a "someone else's problem" thing.
You are tasked with making changes, you are given a folder with source code. You get the build system working, and you get to work fulfilling your tasks.
And then 30 years later it turns out that the only version that anyone knows where it is is the one you overwrote. The prior builds were stored in randomly named zips that lived on a series of backup tapes that got thrown out in an office move 15 years ago.
Anyone who thinks archiving source code is "easy" has never EVER worked on anything larger than fizzbuzz.c
As soon as you have a team of people that includes sound and art you need an actual staff member, probably two, who do NOTHING ELSE OTHER THAN FIGHT YOU FOR FILES. And a fight it is. Always. Because "source" isn't just your c files, it also means the .fuk files that the proprietary Fucktard Image Creator that your artists use, AND the toolchain that turns .fuk into .dfe files that the build scripts want, and the source code to the tool that Dave wrote that manages Dave's File Extension files, AND the command line parameters that are basically only stored in Dave's head that without which you are never figuring it out.

>>713004209
>How would they have explained to investors that they just lost months of work and cost them millions of dollars if one of the computer's hard drives were to fail?
Assets got passed around the office - one guy textures another guy's model, one guy refactored and tested another's code, so one failing wouldn't be the end of the world, most stuff existed in some form somewhere.
Setbacks from computer failure absolutely happened though.

>>713004523
I’m sensing some personal experience here…

>>713004523
>Anyone who thinks archiving source code is "easy" has never EVER worked on anything larger than fizzbuzz.c
All modern software development is done in git so yeah it's extremely easy to archive your entire project and every single change that was ever made to it, even if your project is the Chrome browser and has 100 million lines of code.

>>713004209
I read the interview and Maehiro explains that it was a combination of fast workloads during the Square Soft era, as soon as one project was finished it was on to the next.
Also, he explained that the Japanese version was always first but how they localised the game would be to overwrite the original Japanese version, he went on to state the obvious that games weren't updated once released with patches like they are now e.t.c. all of that we knew.
So it was a combination of careless mismanagement of the source code, overwriting because of localisation to save time, and people being immediately moved off the project who might have been able to archive and save the source code.

>>712996339 (OP)
It says lost not deleted. The source code could have been in storage that was damaged. Iirc that's what happened with silent hill games.

>>712996339 (OP)
does Japan not know what github is? or even just basic version control? what happens if somoene irreversibly fucks up the code?

>>712997210
Yes, they would likely be passing it around on floppy or some other rewritable medium, because you shared code over physical media back then.
Then, after release, no one bothered to track which hard drive or floppy it was on. It just gets shoved somewhere and forgotten. Literally lost, not necessarily deleted as OP implies.

>>712996339 (OP)
back then people made new games instead of pushing out rehashes because they were creatively bankrupt

>>712996339 (OP)
I know this is difficult for you to understand, zoomer, but data and storage used to be the expensive part of computing.

>>713005151
Github didn't exist at the time, anon.
>what happens if somoene irreversibly fucks up the code?
seppuku

>>712999309
>games used to release without game breaking bugs, little fella.
quite literally never true in the history of software existing

>>713004209
They probably did back up their work, but no one was checking that the backups were viable. Backups were often "copy all your shit to $FOLDER on the server at the end of every day." And most days people would "forget" or they'd only upload the stuff they are actively thinking of, forgetting that there's actually 8 files hidden in a scratch directory that are crucial to the process.
If you're a really well funded company you maybe have enough resources for whole disk backups and an automated program. But the cost of the tapes and the IT guy that manages it means that at the end of the project the staff member was let go and nobody else gave enough of a shit to find out what the cardboard box of "WSTN1 Dailies" is all about.
Hell, in each of these companies where they say they "lost" the source code, I'd wager they actually genuinely literally "lost" it, in that it actually 100% completely exists, but nobody has a fucking clue where to even start looking.

so what happened to the WOTL source code? they lost that too?

>>712996339 (OP)
What about the psp version?

>>713004523
>the .fuk files of the proprietary Fucktard Image Creator that your artists use, AND the toolchain that turns .fuk into .dfe files that the build scripts want, and the source code to the tool that Dave wrote that manages Dave's File Extension files, AND the command line parameters that are basically only stored in Dave's head

This is a profoundly accurate understanding of what it's like to actually develop a game.

>>712996339 (OP)
>Keeping that kind of data wasn't a normal thing to do.
It absolutely was, they were just shit developers.

>>713000221
FFVI is incredibly broken in its initial releases. Sketch glitch being the most obvious / dangerous, but attack accuracy calculations are broken (dark status does nothing, attacks either hit or don't, there is no accuracy being properly checked), Evade doing nothing and conversely Magic Evade being incredibly powerful since it gets to double dip, glitching inventory using the Coliseum...the list goes on.

>>713005619
They deleted it because Shakespeare was cancelled

>>713005232
In 1997 if they were competent they were sharing over LAN.

>>713004885
Oh yeah. I could fill the post limit with the amount of bullshit I deal with. And it's not even my fucking job to deal with this, I just know I'll get the "can you have a look for..." email when shit hits the fan so I pre-emptively try to wrangle the tards before then.
>>713004984
Git is a great help, but it's far from the whole story. Large binaries tend not to find themselves in git. We have stuff like git-lfs but most of the time nobody bothers to set it up. And so your non-c file source winds up held outside the git tree in ways that are difficult to keep track of.

>>713000356
Intelligent people being disorganized is a pretty common phenomenon. Especially in an ADHD rich field like programing.
As an ADHD programmer, I'm terrible about tedious stuff like documentation and backing up data.

>>712996578
???

Are the language files not stored as separate assets?

>>712998457
Anon, until recently (Dark Souls 1) JP devs weren’t savvy enough to decouple rendering from game simulation in theirs game engines.

>>713004209
They probably had just enough backups while in active development, but ended up gradually overwriting everything afterwards or didn't bother copying files for old projects while upgrading hardware.

>>713006081
Apparently not, they wrote over the original Japanese when localising to save time.

>>713006315
Japs like determinism. They like things to work the same way every time. Western devs may have been early to variable frame rates and separate world state, physics and game ticks, but that's because nobody ever accused a crpg of being deterministic. How many popular made-in-america games have framerate dependant physics? Where they only superficially appear to be framerate agnostic but the speedrunners know that running quake at the FPS cap lets them bunny hop up walls?
The Japs had the right idea. Nobody fucking ever gets decoupled logic 100% correct, best to just admit you're dumb and make everything 30Hz/60Hz with a vsync lock and not waste time thinking you're smart only to fuck it up badly.

The same thing happens in the US too. The only reason the Fallout 1 and 2 source code was saved was because of the woman who lead the team who ported it to Mac. The suits didn't give a shit and threw that shit away and expressly forbade Tim Cain from saving anything when he left.

>>713006675
save what time exactly
the 20 seconds it takes to right click > add to archive > rename to "ff tactics grorious nippon backup.zip"?

JP executives were cheap bastards who refused to pay the very mild costs of backing shit up on HDDs. It only took a few catastrophic data losses in the Western industry to realize having some HDDs where you routinely back data up, then unplug it and put it in a safe was a GOOD IDEA.
to be fair, those old JP boomers never considered that in the future you could take an old game and just sell them again a decade later. Like, seriously? People will pay for that old game again just to play it on a new console? Are there not any NEW games to buy?

>>713007082
I've no idea, you'd have to ask the Japs what they mean I'm just repeating what Maehiro said in the interview.

>>712996339 (OP)
Actually getting rid of old shit you dont immediatelly need is normal and desired by any big company. Learn about 5S you unemployed monkey

>>713007082
They probably did, but then where did you put that .zip? And who knows you did and also the significance of it? Do they even work there anymore? Did you even do it correctly? Maybe you only got some of the files because you didn't know that the program you use to compile the .txt files into baked .c files uses a bunch of shit in its own folder and that's what you've been overwriting? You don't know until you know, and then it's too late. The answer is always easy once you know the question.

>>712996339 (OP)
>Why are japs so incompetent at game development?
They're not. This is actually a clever way of preventing their IPs from falling into foreign hands + creates a professional level of sought after demand for collectors + younger generations to fantasize about, driving longterm future profits for said developers.
The loss of source code for an old Japanese video game, while seemingly a setback, can be a net positive for the gaming industry and players alike. When source code vanishes, it forces developers to innovate rather than recycle old assets, pushing studios to create fresh intellectual property instead of leaning on nostalgia-driven remasters. This scarcity drives competition, as companies must invest in new tools, engines, and talent to rebuild or reimagine classics, fostering technological advancements that benefit the broader industry. For instance, reverse-engineering efforts to recreate lost games often lead to breakthroughs in emulation and preservation techniques, as seen with projects like the Super Mario 64 decompilation, which enhanced modding and cross-platform accessibility.
For gamers, this loss cultivates a vibrant community ecosystem. Fan-driven projects, from ROM hacks to full remakes, thrive in the absence of official source code, empowering amateur developers and preserving gaming history. These efforts often yield modernized versions of classics, optimized for today’s hardware, offering enhanced experiences at little to no cost. Moreover, the void left by lost code encourages studios to prioritize robust archiving practices, ensuring future titles are better preserved. Ultimately, this dynamic sparks creativity, strengthens community engagement, and drives innovation, enriching the gaming landscape for all.
If you can't see that, you might be stupid.

>>712996339 (OP)
>none of the war of the lion content is in
Why is Square Enix so obsessed with removing content from "definitive" versions of games?

>>712997983
This.
They got paid regardless. Vidya's just a business at the end of the day.

>>713007989
WotL was literal cancer. Removing it actually improves the remaster. Stop being a little bitch.

On the flip side the main scenario script is 60% larger. Pretty significant
https://x.com/YasumiMatsuno/status/1935191460619718669

>>713007989
Less content is good, chud!
Now preorder the mythril knife or kys

>>713008662
Doesn't tell us much.

>>712996339 (OP)
Blizzard also admitted to losing the source code for vanilla WoW and The TBC Crusade. Corporate wageslaves don't give a shit about the company's old code.

>>713007989
Square Enix’s approach to trimming content from “definitive” versions, which also means excluding War of the Lions, isn’t about malice. Truthfully, it’s a calculated move to streamline their legacy. By focusing on the original vision, they’re curating a purer experience, free from the bloat of later additions like Balthier or Cloud cameos, which some argue dilute the core story. This forces devs to rebuild from scratch, often due to lost source code, sparking innovation in how they modernize classics. Look at the Pixel Remasters: they prioritized the OG Final Fantasy experience, and fans still ate it up. Cutting content also drives community engagement + fans dissect changes, modders step in to restore or enhance, and the buzz keeps the game relevant. Plus, it’s a kino business play (i.e. limited content creates demand for future DLC or re-releases, ensuring long-term revenue). For gamers at large, this means a leaner, focused title that respects the original’s soul, while the modding scene fills gaps for free. It’s not about removing value. It’s about redefining what “definitive” means for a new era, balancing nostalgia with fresh creativity.
Seriously, it's not that big a deal. Either but it or don't. Your complaining won't stop the remaster from being a smashing success.

>>713004380
Well what storage did you have in 1990, 1992, 1994 & 1996. The price of storage changed a lot throughout the 90s.

>>713008697
The bootlicking will intensify the closer we get to release anon.

>>713009501
>or Cloud cameos
lol
Anon thinks there is a vision behind all this

>>713000883
You can forget things you loved as a child. It's okay, you don't have to obsess over it for the rest of your life.

>>713009536
There's no "bootlicking" anywhere. It's a genuinely good remaster that'll make Square a ton of money.
Seethe.

>>713010056
Keep it up

>>713010056
Enjoy your starting knife and 10 potions I guess???

This is a verified list of video games whose source code was lost at least temporarily by the copyright holder. If anyone wants sources that verify that the source code for a particular game was lost, feel free to ask.

Almost one-hundred games from Atari Corporation.
Most old Konami, Sega and Square Enix games.
The Rockman World game series (a.k.a. the Mega Man games for Game Boy).
Living Books series.

Autoduel (1985).
Ambermoon (1993).
Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator (2004-2012).
BioShock (2007).
Blade Runner (1997).
Blake Stone: Planet Strike (1994).
Bubble Bobble (1986).
Chasm: The Rift (1997).
Virgin Games' Disney's Aladdin (1993).
Doom for Sega Saturn (1997).
Doom II: Hell on Earth for Microsoft Windows (1995).
Duke Nukem (1991).
Duke Nukem II (1993).
Ecco the Dolphin (1992).
Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (2002).
Fallout (1997).
Fallout 2 (1998).
Final Fantasy VII (1997) [less than a year after release].
Final Fantasy VIII (1999).
Gemini Rue for Android (2014).
Golden Axe (1989).
Grim Fandango (1998).
Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete (2000).
Hollywood Monsters (1997).
Homeworld: Cataclysm (2000).
Icewind Dale II (2002).
Lure of the Temptress (1992).
Marathon 2: Durandal for Microsoft Windows (1996).
Mass Effect: Pinnacle Station (2009).
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee for Microsoft Windows/DOS (1997).
Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus for PlayStation (1998).
Prince of Persia (1989).
Ridiculous Fishing for Android (2013).
Saints Row 2 for Microsoft Windows (2008).
Sonic Spinball (1993).
Star Control 2 for DOS (1992).
System Shock 2 (1999).
Tribes 2 (2001).
Virtua Racing (1992).
Virtua Formula (1993).
Zool for Amiga (1992).
ZZT (1991).

There's only beta source code surviving for Disney's Beauty & The Beast: A Boardgame Adventure (1999), Donkey Kong (1983) [Atari 8-bit], The Little Mermaid II: Pinball Frenzy (2000), Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee [PSX], Silent Hill 2 (2001), and Silent Hill 3 (2003).
It's a pity that source code releases aren't more common.

>>713007989
Calling war of the lions definitive edition was an attack at the original fanbase

>>713012335
BioShock (2007): Recovered and it compiles fine.
Blake Stone: Planet Strike (1994): Recovered, released under the GPL.
Virgin Games' Disney's Aladdin (1993): Recovered by the Video Game History Foundation.
Ecco the Dolphin (1992): Recovered by CodeFire to make a Game Body Advance port.
Fallout (1997): Recovered by Tim Cain. It does not compile.
Grim Fandango (1998): Recovered.
Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete (2000): Source code for the Mac port recovered.
Prince of Persia (1989): Recovered, available on GitHub. https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II
Saints Row 2 for Microsoft Windows (2008): Recovered, an update it's on the works. Deep Silver and Volition promised Mike "IdolNinja" Watson that they will finish the update no matter what. The likelihood of Volition actually delivering, however, is pretty low, considering that they are now dead, and six feet under.
Sonic Spinball (1993): Recovered by CodeFire to make a Game Body Advance port.
Virtua Formula (1993): Recovered, used as the basis for the Virtua Racing port for Nintendo Switch.
ZZT (1991): There's a byte accurate recreation on GitHub under the MIT License with the blessing of Tim Sweeney. The actual source code from 1991 was recovered in 2023

The concept of remakes and remasters wasn't a thing at the time. Nor was continuous patching. A game would be released and that was that, the dev would move on to something else and nobody gave two fucks what happened to the source code.

>>713012507
>The concept of remakes and remasters wasn't a thing at the time.

>>713012616
a port to another system is not a remake or remaster

>>713012670
Mongoloid.
>In 1991, Sierra released a remake titled Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards for MS-DOS, Mac, and Amiga. This version used the Sierra's Creative Interpreter (SCI) engine, featuring 256 colors and a point-and-click, icon-driven (as opposed to the original's text-based) user interface.
>remake

>>713007989
its not removing if they lost it...

>>712998617
>this totally didn't happen to other companies

>>713012796
considering it went from text based to point and click with pictures remake had a different meaning back then

Just make FFT2 at this point square, if you want us to believe you worked oh so hard on this remaster by writing code from scratch. How 'bout that?

>>713013115
Choke on shit, faggot.

>>713013264
I wasn't even that guy dismissing remakes at the time. There is a clear difference with that leisure suit larry example though

>>713013398
Recreating a previous game from scratch on a new engine for newer systems adding QoL updates is the very definition of a remake.

>>712996339 (OP)
Happens all the time, I used to work for a certain film studio that made some major movies back in the 90's. There was a point where we didn't know where any of the original cuts for these films were. I'd bet my bottom dollar that they're still looking to this day.

>>712996339 (OP)
"at the time" oh don't worry that kind of stuff still happen today

>>713013672
There's recently that Batgirl movie which was erased from the face of the earth

>>713013519
That's because due to FF7 remake and RE2, many people now think that remake are all re-imagining instead

Here's some source code that it's known to be preserved, but has not been publicly released for one reason or another:
NFL Blitz (1997), 720° (1986), APB (1987), Championship Sprint (Super Sprint II) (1986), Vindicators (1988), Rampage (1986), S.T.U.N. Runner (1989): Owned by Mike Mika.[1][2][4][5]
Aliens Versus Predator: Gold Edition (2000): Owned by Rebecca Ann Heineman, developer of the Mac port.[3]
San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing (1997): Owned by M. Mika; Nintendo 64 and arcade.[4]
Doom for Atari Jaguar (1994): Owned by R. A. Heineman, partially released.[6]
Ms. Pac-Man for Sega Genesis (1991), Hard Drivin' for Sega Mega Drive (1990), Battlehawks 1942 (1988): Owned by M. Mika.[7][9]
Killing Time (1995): Owned by R. A. Heineman.[8]
Magic Johnson's Fast Break (1988), Silver Surfer (1990), Wolverine (1991): Owned by Kevin Edwards.[10][11] No plans for a public release.[12]
Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete (2000): Owned by John Keoni Morris,[13] sent to Ubisoft.[14]
Pole Position for ZX Spectrum (1984): Owned by Graeme Devine.[15]

[1] https://x.com/MikeJMika/status/1154438658503536640
[2] https://x.com/MikeJMika/status/1154450061826248704
[3] https://x.com/burgerbecky/status/1426243074032873473
[4] https://x.com/MikeJMika/status/1444835416306171915
[5] https://x.com/MikeJMika/status/1445426867654172676
[6] https://x.com/burgerbecky/status/1436865954475134984
[7] https://x.com/MikeJMika/status/1273644318570369024
[8] https://x.com/burgerbecky/status/1434294117815705605
[9] https://x.com/MikeJMika/status/750552204034138112
[10] https://x.com/KevEdwardsRetro/status/1266512220336394244
[11] https://x.com/KevEdwardsRetro/status/1264951862404567043
[12] https://x.com/KevEdwardsRetro/status/1265013248828551168
[13] https://x.com/DiskBlitz/status/920801845349466113
[14] https://x.com/DiskBlitz/status/920803185828159490
[15] https://x.com/zaphodgjd/status/1425578432352583685

>>713013847
Yeah... nobody in the industry wants that getting out. Some of these projects were buried for a very good reason.

>>713014069
Burger?

>>712996339 (OP)
They do it on purpose.

>>713014158
Burgerlib is basically the SDL-like software used by Rebecca Heineman (formerly known as William Salvador Heineman) in her game porting projects.
https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/burgerlib

>>712996339 (OP)
>Who deletes what amounts to maybe a few megabytes of text files after they release a game
It's not a few megabytes, source code takes much more space than compiled code, and you need the original assets too.
To take into account a simple comparison, the source code of windows 10 is 500GB big, this code then gets split and compressed into a 5.5GB iso, which then gets uncompressed at install time into a 32GB set of files, it's really not that easy to keep track of some things.
And take into account that version control systems like subversion and git weren't really common back in the 90s, if they even existed to begin with.

>>713014470
>And take into account that version control systems like subversion and git weren't really common back in the 90s, if they even existed to begin with.
Freetards could use Concurrent Versions System just fine. Why couldn't major video game companies? Besides, Visual SourceSafe was used in many game studios at the time.

>>712996339 (OP)
In 1995 it would've cost them 1k dollars to back up a 10GB project on a tape storage.

>>713014752
Remember they're japanese, the same country that just last year ditched floppy disks in their government offices and which 90% of the population does barely know how to use a computer, let alone how to code if their life depended on it.

>>713015106
Poor Square Enix, they could barely afford to spend that much money back then.
>The combined development and marketing budget amounted to approximately US$80 million.

>>713015160
You wouldn't know how to code either if every variable and command was a different kanji

>>713015474
I'm expecting them to eventually end up like Ubisoft & absorbed by a larger firm in the near-future. They're already halfway there thanks to all the inane dumbass decisions they've built up on over the past 20 years.

>it’s heckin negligent they didn’t preserve my VIDEOGAMES

version control barely even existed back then, the entire build system was probably 3 dudes MS DOS computers that weren’t even networked together

>>713015489

>>713015823
Revision Control System exists since 1982, gamedevs just happen to be tremendously retarded, even today.
There's a reason why Electronic Arts kept the source code for Pinball Construction Set, a 1982 video game, just fine.

>>712998160
HAHAHAHAHA

Source code preservation is quite shoddy even today. Frank Cifaldi went to the Game Developer Conference (GDC) and asked the attendees:
1. How many of them worked on a game that shipped five or more years ago? A lot of them raised their hands.
2. How many of them felt that they could get it to compile right now? There are very few people left.
3. How many of them feel that the game could be compiled twenty years from now? None of them kept their hands raised.
https://youtu.be/dp-DRU24J18?t=3069

>>713001109
Japan can be PRETTY FUCKING stupid with some shit we consider common sense here, anon. You can feel it even by doing something as mundane as watching some normie anime.

>>713006808
Fallout? Even 76, the MMO, had physics tied to the framerate because Bethesda is retarded

>>713016340
Can't find the vid now but Snoy did a neat presentation about how they're preserving stuff, setting up VMs with the build environment and holding onto source assets too, hope other devs took note from it
hopefully they still have the debug symbols for PS1/PS2 games that 3rd party devs were required to submit too

>>713016990
There's a good Gamasutra (fuck it, I'm not calling them Game Developer) about preservation.
Sony elaborated on their preservation techniques there.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/where-games-go-to-sleep-the-game-preservation-crisis-part-1
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/where-games-go-to-sleep-the-game-preservation-crisis-part-2
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/where-games-go-to-sleep-the-game-preservation-crisis-part-3

>>713001110
i think it's a cultural thing,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPKjnJ4oi4k
this video sort of explains it, but if you no longer need the source code, why waste space on storing it. things are different now that you can just store it on a cloud server and not have to worry about physical storage anymore. or maybe not, maybe they're still just deleting source code once it's no longer needed.

https://kotaku.com/bankrupted-studio-says-square-enix-demanded-code-by-fax-5806511

>>713007239
where were some of thos catastrophic data losses?

>>713007781
huh?

>>713001308
yeah, a better example would've been the collection of mana, where nintendo handed Square their own source code so they could release Trials of mana in english.
Nintendo does keep an archive of pretty much everything.

>>713018132
Here's the original source in Swedish about Square Enix asking source code to be sent via fax:
>Relationen med den japanska speljätten hade varit bra, ända fram till veckan före bröllopet. Grin såg visserligen inte röken av några pengar men Bosse fick ständiga försäkringar av de producenter han hade kontakt med i stort sett varje dag: ”nej då, vi ska inte lägga ner projektet, allt är så bra, vi är jättenöjda”.
>Sen lät det annorlunda. Plötsligt krävde Square Enix att allt skulle faxas till dem. Inklusive projektets musikfiler.
>– Det är så dumt som det låter. Det är ett omöjligt krav, du kan inte skicka ascii- eller binärkoder på fax. Det är efterblivet. Riktigt efterblivet. Det var nästan ett kriminellt beteende.
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/spela/a/5VLMw6/strypta-av-speljatten

>>713015823
companies like square were doing it even in the 00s. i don't think any of them actually thought preserving source code was worth it until hd remasters of old games started being made.

>>713004209
>It can't be helped

>finally the game is complete and released, what should we do with the code and assets now?
>idk just delete it lmao
why is japan like this?

Did you know that Bluepoint Games has gone on record, many times, about using the original source code?

>>713018719
ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER!

>>713019815
>>713018132

>>712996339 (OP)
Im convinced Yamauchi killed a member of the staff of Nintendo for losing some source code.
Since then they kept everything.

>>713019356
the companies that were shit at keeping source code had to learn the hard way a decade ago when they were forced to reverse engineer their old games.

>>713018883
Bullshit. Its not like humanity just recently discovered the benefits of preserving knowledge and past work. What really happened is that storage was more expensive back then and then this happened, same as it does today:

>boss we're done with the game, what should we do with it? We can store it forever if you want in case you need it later
>how much does that cost?
>0.000000001% of our yearly revenue
>OY VEY!!!!!!!! SHUT IT DOWN!!!!! DELETE EVERYTHING!!!!!

A lot of developers made back ups of their games, probably out of love to their work or because they saw profitability in keeping that material. Nintendo, Al Lowe, William Salvador/Rebecca Ann Heineman, John Calhoun, John Romero, Dave Ashley, Digital Eclipse, BioWare employees, Kevin Edwards, Climax Studios, Electronic Arts, David S. Maynard, Chris Shrigley, Williams Electronics/Bally Midway Games, Ed Fries, Telltale Games, Microsoft, and even Tose Software preserved a lot of material.
>don't know if I ever told you, but the Tose pres told me they have all of the source code for every game they've done
https://x.com/frankcifaldi/status/851263162670133248

>>712996339 (OP)
Games area disposable medium, just like manga.

>>713020434
at least the japanese government preserves them, the national diet library is a great resource for finding manga that were never scanned digitally.

>>713014752
>Freetards could use Concurrent Versions System just fine. Why couldn't major video game companies? Besides, Visual SourceSafe was used in many game studios at the time.
Everyone hated CVS. zoomers today think git is hard because you get into problems that need a lot of googling to fix. CVS regularly got into such a shit state that burning it to the ground was the only fix. And when you're running out of time and haven't slept much in the last month, you aren't spending time to "learn" CVS properly. Zips and Copy of Folder starts happening on everyone's machine, regardless of what the CVS guy says.
And Source Safe was beyond hated. Everyone who used it can tell you about how it nearly destroyed their project. SS was a combination database and SMB share. Everyone was connected to the SMB share and files would be checked in and out from the database controlled server. However at any time there could be a discrepancy of whether the mysource.c on the SMB share or the one in the database was correct or not. Because it used SMB permissions to block access from people who were not checked out, but guess how reliable windows SMB was when your clients were running win9x. So you write your changes, someone else commits theirs, and SS doesn't tell anyone there was a conflict, it just trashes the file. No problem, just get the file off your local machine, right? Nope, Visual C++ deleted that when you checked it in. Hope you have a backup.
I had a good laugh when someone was delivered an entire server with source safe installed as the source for a project and it was completely useless because someone didn't check in their copy before they left and SS refused to export the last known good version until they did. In the end they had to track down that employee and ask if he still had the files on his machine. God knows what he charged them for that.

>>712996578
woulda been fine by me, they didn't even release it in yurop

>>713020178
It's not even as if it's as simple as just copying it to something and not losing it. You have to keep format shifting because floppies demagnetise, tapes go mouldy, CD-Rs turn brown, hard drives get stiction and then burn out on first spin up, sd cards corrupt themselves if they aren't powered up often enough... Storing things forever becomes a job where someone, often multiple someones, have to keep pulling stuff out of the vault and copying them to fresh media, comparing checksums as they go.

>>713020829
And yet freetards were able to get around the limitations of CVS.
And ditto for the companies that used VSS, like Interplay and Mucky Foot.
And the multi-million dollar couldn't, for some reason.

https://x.com/burgerbecky/status/1436865954475134984
>disc burned circa 1994-1996
>worked just fine, and was preserved in 2021
Huh...

>>713021758
think of all the money the company could save by not buying a CD(singular)

>>712996339 (OP)
Good, the Shakespearean English in the game was really silly.

>>713021535
Freetards usually used the skills of an archivist. There was a project maintainer and his chosen few who had the keys to the CVS server. They worked to make sure it wasn't destroyed principally by never giving out more than read only access to CVS. Outside contribution was done with tarballs and manual checkin. CVS was only minimally involved.
Using Source Safe was like the idiot saying "I've got stuff on floppies from 1980 and it all still works." Good for you. That's what's called luck. I've never had an SSD fail. Never. Does that mean I'll put everything on SSDs and never back up? Fuck no. Source Safe had major bugs, major flaws and fundamental problems with the very concepts it uses and there's a reason it was abandoned long before git existed. That Interplay and Mucky Foot used it tells me either they were VERY fucking lucky or actually they knew it was a walking disaster and their sysadmin kept a special backup for when the lead dev phoned him again and said "yeah, I can't access somefile.c and graphicslib doesn't have any of the changes I made yesterday."

>>713022197
Cultureless retard, go watch niggers play sports.

>>713022496
Okay, what excuse do you have for Perforce? It exists since 1995, and it has been used by many video game studios.

>>713021758
I have maybe 500 CD-Rs made between '95 and '05 that were used for weekly backups. When I went through them around 2020 10 had unreadable sectors. CD-Rs are reliable, but just because the data you wanted was on the 490 that were okay and not the 10 that weren't doesn't mean you weren't doing it wrong. You were lucky. Me? I was an nntp whore, I knew the virtues of par files, I lost nothing. One CD-R is not a backup.

>>713022796
Pretty sure that a corporation like Squaresoft could afford making annual CD-R back-ups.
That was an extreme 25-year window.

>>712998081
Koei Tecmo also has some fuckups

>lost the source code
>one poor guy has to manually rewrite the entire script by playing the game
no wonder it took them 7 years to finish it

>>713022778
>Okay, what excuse do you have for Perforce? It exists since 1995, and it has been used by many video game studios.
I used Perforce around '98 to '00. I kinda liked it. The problem mostly though was that it had expensive licensing. It was free for 2 users, but once you needed 3 that was a BIG jump for a small studio or even a big studio that had to lie, cheat and steal for their budgets.
So it wasn't uncommon for perforce users to start rolling their own jank to work around the limitation.
The other problem with perforce was it was a hard checkin-checkout system. If you had a file checked out it was locked so no one else could work on it, and this was achieved by the perforce client marking all non-checked out files as read only. However naturally if you had popularfile.h checked out because you were doing big work on it, the 2 other guys that needed to make "just one quick change" would just unlock theirs do the change and "totally remember" when the file was available. And they wouldn't.
Ah, but perforce has conflict resolution! Yeah, and git merge it most certainly was fucking not. p4diff generally turned multi-line edits into complete mince so you learned really quick not to touch that.
And so again you wind up with the CVS/SVN problem where there's always several employees that treat perforce as the devil and just keep copy/pasting working directories and doing manual commits. And they lost edits constantly.
I cannot fucking stress enough how much BETTER life is now we have git. Git isn't just a better source control system, it's literally the 2nd time in history one has EVER been usable.

>>713020212
Some people are just hoarders and others aren't
I've got every school assignment since like end of middle school plus all the files and emails I worked with from every job I every worked at
Not normal behavior though

>>712996339 (OP)
>keeping that kind of data wasn't a normal thing to do at the time
yes it was
maybe not for retarded japs, but it was for everyone else

>>713023307
>but once you needed 3 that was a BIG jump for a small studio or even a big studio that had to lie, cheat and steal for their budgets
I think that a studio that could afford to spend 80 million to make a game, could've easily afford to license Perforce.
But keep making up excuses for Square.

>>713023605
>>713016340

>>713023706
>But keep making up excuses for Square.
I'm not making excuses. I don't give a shit about square/squaresoft/squeenix. I'm just telling you how it actually was in the trenches and how the problem is hard to solve because it involves getting shitloads of staff to give two shits about their job long enough to not fuck up when doing it right is difficult and expensive and doing it wrong is so much easier.
And you don't understand how billion dollar companies work. THEY have billions of dollars, YOU do not. They say "your budget for this month is $X" and you say "we need $1000 per user for Perforce licenses" and they check the profit margin and say no. If you say you need it and there's no cheaper way, they might just cancel the project because it's not worth doing. So the obvious reality is you shut the fuck up and do the project the cheap and stupid way. And then run away when it's done and not do anything to stop an intern shredding the backup tapes.

>>712996339 (OP)
Didn't the same thing happen with kingdom hearts and FF8?
What the hell is SE doing

>>713024112
they went bankrupt in like 2001 and got bought out by Enix. they probably burned their archives just to spite their new owners.

>>713024064
You're right, it was better off to give up and not use any kind of version control instead of doing what companies that give a shit were able to do around the EXACT same time, somehow. Gamedevs were smarter than Microsoft at its peak, indeed.

>>713016990
>setting up VMs with the build environment
It's a good idea. But I have VMs from 5 years ago that don't start on modern KVM. It's just bullshit all the way down. One day someone will dredge up the VM, use qemu-img to turn it into something a modern VM solution can use, possibly have to use x86 emulation because we're all using RISC-V or some shit, and then nothing will work because the programs in it crash on anything that isn't the exact P2 they used in the office because the guy who wrote it ignored the "do not use this" warnings.
The most you can say is, at least someone TRIED to preserve it. That's all you can really ask.

>>712996578
That's insane, the script is pulled from resource files. Only a retard would hard code the script in the game engine.

>>712996339 (OP)
They probably don't delete it insomuch as they simply had no procedures in place to keep the data safe and preserve it for the future. The source code was probably left on whatever computers they used for development, then eventually those computers were used for something else or were discarded and replaced with newer models and they had no rule or process which said important data like source code had to be backed up and preserved somewhere.

>>713012489
>Saints Row 2 for Microsoft Windows (2008): Recovered, an update it's on the works
That leaked a while back here on 4chan, you can probably find the link and the obnoxiously long password in the archives
No source code unfortunately, just the compiled version of cancerman managed to make

>>712999309
Smarmy faggot

>>713007781
Did you get an AI to help write this for you? It has the verbiage and flow I see with AI shit, you just capped it off with an insult.

>>713024786
Interesting...

>>712998160
product shipped, on to the next one.
stop thinking games are anything more than disposable entertainment

>>713004885
That's the experience of any dev over 40. I remember in my 20s when I thought "how could you lose source code." Now I've seen it happen; sometimes even to code we "saved." >oh no! turns out the program to open that file only worked on Widows XP in 98 compatibility mode and has no way of running on modern hardware
>oh no the version of the library needed to compile the project isn't hosted anywhere anymore and was just on our build guy's local machine and that got wiped when he left five years ago
Unless you are regression testing all of your build processes every time you upgrade or change ANYTHING eventually something will fall through the cracks, but often times it's not economical to do that because you'd spend 95% of your time just testing when 99.9% of the time the code you're trying to save won't ever be needed again and, if it was, could probably be recreated faster and better using modern practices.

>>712998081
Konami had this problem with Silent hill, it is a nibbanese problem.