Summary
By now, it’s no secret why exactly proper game preservation is important. It’s whyUbisoftisworking to make both The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest playable offline after delisting and shutting down the original The Crew.
It’s also whyPlayStationis working topreserve its 30-year history by maintaining over 200 million files that have since been stored in real-life mineshafts on data tapes that can easily be retrieved.
However, in the latest instance of why exactly preservation is important, it appears that the original source code for the firstFalloutgame has been unfortunately lost.
The Code Was An Important Part Of Gaming’s Long History
As first spotted by GamesRadar, the creator of Fallout, Tim Cain, shared in a recent YouTube video that the original material that made up the RPG has since been lost.
To start, Cain says that when he left Fallout, he was told he had to destroy the archive he was maintaining. “When I left Fallout, I was told ‘You have to destroy everything you have,’ and I did. My entire archive. Early design notes, code for different versions, prototypes, all the GURPS code – gone.”
Apparently, Interplay, the team behind the original game, intended to keep an archive of their own, but “they lost it,” according to Cain.
“When they finally, a few years after I left, contacted me and said, ‘Oops, we lost it,’ I thought they were trapping me into ‘We’re going to sue you if you say you have it.’ Turns out, no, they really lost it,” Cain recalled.
Currently, the code for the retail version of the game has since been recovered, but everything else is unfortunately lost, including the original version of the game, as well as original artwork assets. It’s another stark reminder of just how important it is to maintain archives of current game files, offline modes for online games and to find ways to preserve older titles as much as possible.
