PlayStation’s new game preservation expert explains what his job actually is
Sony has hired a prominent new software engineer for its game preservation team and he’s started explaining what he’ll be working on.
Before Microsoft made a selling point of backwards compatibility, game preservation was not something that many companies took seriously. In fact, some, including Sony, seemed to go out of their way to prevent old games being playable on modern formats.
Times have changed though, and Sony has realised that it needs to up its game, starting with the new PS Plus Premium tier which is primarily focused on having easy access to older PlayStation titles.
They also have a newly established preservation team, although this wasn’t known by most people until respected community figure Garrett Fredley announced he’d got a job as a Senior Build Engineer. That’s not a very descriptive title though, so he’s been trying to explain to fans what it really means.
To help, Fredley posted a speech he made at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2019, on the general subject of game preservation, when he was still working at EA.
Since he’s only just started his new job, he says he’s still not sure whether he’ll personally be doing any emulation work but he suggests that his work at Sony is ‘larger in scope’ than EA – although that wouldn’t be hard as traditionally EA has appeared even less interested in preservation than Sony.
The GDC talk discusses how proper game preservation means being able to play a game even after 100 years of storage (Fredley’s own example!), which involves proper documentation and retaining the tools, servers, clients, and compilers necessary to make it work – so not just keeping a back-up of the source code and calling it a day.
Whether Sony is prepared to go to those lengths remains to
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