PlayStation Preservation Milestone

An Important Job for Garret Fredley

Recently, a PlayStation preservation expert named Garret Fredley has reached an impressive milestone: 500 terabytes (TB) of Sony’s gaming history have been safely stored.

Fredley shared this achievement on Twitter, writing:

"We have crossed the 500 TBs threshold of preserved PlayStation history at work🥳

It’s weird to consider what half a petabyte looks like considering the size of modern AAA titles. It’s an honour to preserve it all, but copying hundreds of millions of files is super slow

Objectives and Challenges

• Preservation Practices: The PS Studios IP Preservation team, which Fredley oversees, focuses on establishing preservation practices for future titles and archiving past games as comprehensively as possible.

Relevance and Future Benefits

The work done by Fredley’s team will be extremely important for future endeavours in the gaming industry:

• Reduction of Loss: With readily available source code, artwork, and resources, reproducing or re-releasing games will become easier. This means a significant reduction in the risk of losing crucial game data.
• Historical Significance: It also preserves historical data which could be invaluable for future research and development within the industry.

Given that Sony is now taking these steps, one might wonder if other major gaming companies are doing similar preservation efforts? Do you think Nintendo, Microsoft, or any other company should follow suit?