The talk, which has since been written up by GamesRadar staff (who were in attendance), centered on the problem of how you go about preservation if you have over 30 years' worth of history to capture, record, and archive. And the solution sounds like something out of an old science fiction novel or an Indiana Jones film.
According to Fredley, PlayStation is currently building a secret "cold storage" vault located inside a set of old mineshafts to store mountains of data tapes, containing art, assets, and code from its games, with only a select group of individuals including the IP preservation team and a few members of PlayStation's IT department having access to the wealth of information.
How it works, as explained by Fredley, is that the company has two "staging vaults" located in Las Vegas and Liverpool, that feature fast SSD storage, where developers can upload their files. The information then gets transferred to tape backups, which are then transported to the real vault situated in an undisclosed location.
As Fredley revealed in his talk, over 200 million files and roughly 650 TB of data (thanks Game File!) have so far been preserved from PlayStation's history, as part of this initiative, including everything from the latest PS5 builds to old PlayStation 1 games, such as 1994's Arc the Lad.
Right now, it's not exactly clear what plans (if any) PlayStation has for all this material (besides obviously ensuring its survival) however, with Fredley stating it is "probably always gonna remain an internal service and internal material" and it sadly isn't up to the preservation team to decide to make it publicly available.
Nevertheless, maybe there's hope that one day we'll some of this rescued material find its way into future remasters and collections — now that there's more awareness that there's a team working hard on making sure this material is safe and protected.
