Why are Japanese video game developers so bad at preserving source code?
It's not that they're bad at it. They just didn't care.
>>12266982So...Then they're bad at it?>>12266980Probably because the West is steeped in a very prosecutorial tradition, with copyright law and intellectual property, so companies keep documents mostly out of obligation to sue the ever-loving shit out of you if you cross their profit threshold, even indirectly in the foreseeable future. Fortunately, this has allowed us to preserve even the most dogshit underfunded of games that ever released, most of the time.
>>12266980Why would they preserve it?
Game is done being made; why keep this human-readable code around when it's already bee translated to machine code?
>>12267015So they can more easily remaster/remake/re-release it in the future?
>sir, should I wipe these old hdds? they hold no monetary value to us anymore>no, we must preserve them so morbidly obese american neets can masturbate to them 40 years from now
>>12267021And why, exactly, would they be thinking about that when they initially released the game?
>>122669801) it varies by company. Some of them still have source code from the 80s (like Nintendo), and some of them have lost source code multiple times even after someone else recovered it for them (like Square). Being Japanese or not is irrelevant and it was like this across the entirety of the industry. A lot of what was saved was just people bringing their work stuff home and being too lazy to throw it away.2) a lot of companies didn't save their source code back then because it was assumed they wouldn't need it again. Usually porting a game to a new console required making it again from scratch due to the technology of the time - for example, arcade code would be useless for porting a game to run on the Famicom's hardware, it wasn't like the higher languages of today, everything was written in assembly which was hardware specific, and obviously you wouldn't release the same game twice (Madden wouldn't come until later). The idea of preservation was silly because games were essentially kids toys, just a disposable medium, and the idea of doing source ports to later hardware would have been laughable at best due to the technology of the time.tldr - what >>12266982 said. fpbp.
>>12266980An incredibly deferent attitude between employees and their companies means that no one dares breach NDA or keep materials otherwise related to their work, and companies that were viewing said products and disposable commodities and not real art, so no one kept shit.Square in particular should be absolutely ashamed of their archival of source code, given that even back in the ps1 days they were often porting older games to the ps1, the fact that a company that made sure you could play chrono trigger and ff4-6 on the ps1 didn't think the back up the source code or assets to their current ps1 games is insane.
>>12266980They took Don't copy that floppy campaign to the extremes.
>>12266997>why are you so bad at punching yourself in the dick?I have never once wanted to punch myself in the dick>lol ur bad @ it
>>12266980Because back then once the game "went gold" and was shipped to retail then the project was "finished" and so you'd start the next project by deleting all those old files from your HDD to make room. Look at how even the OG Xbox launched with a mere 8GB HDD in 2001, having space to store data wasn't as trivial as it is now.
>>12266980>QuintetYou mean where the lead writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki scammed people with his credit card company and disappeared?
>>12267109Even former artist refuses to talk about them
>>12267080You can't say you're good at punching yourself in the dick.
>>12266980He's talking out of his ass. He can't know this because he hasn't talked with every former Quintet employee. The truth is nobody would be able to do anything with the source codes even if they had them.>social media picture thread
>>12267021They weren't looking 35 years into the future and expecting these would become classics. It was probably, develop game, release game, develop new game. it's a business, they have to make money. It's how it is unfortunately.Like imagine just 10 years later, it would have been the PS2 era and a company would have been rushing to develop games for that. Transitioning from sprite to 3D graphics would probably have been a big deal for many companies and by around that time 3D games are where it's at and something on the SNES would have been like, who cares, unless you're Nintendo. Plus companies go out of business, they merge, they get bought, that will cause things to get fucked up and lost.
>>12267035>and obviously you wouldn't release the same game twiceStreet Fighter II: The World Warrior (1992)Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1993)Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (1993)Super Street Fighter II Turbo (1994)
>>12267125Oh wow, 1 company did it with 1 game
I remember reading half of the original music tracks for Chrono Trigger were lost because the composer's HDD died during productionIt's hard to think clearly under stress/pressure and mistakes are made
>>12267114Yes, you can. I'm great at punching myself in the dick. Just because you suck at it doesn't mean nobody is good at it.
>>12267021can't tell if trolling or legitimately retarded
>>12266982>They just didn't care.This. I work at a shovelware company and everyone just forgets about the project as soon as it flies out to Steam. If we were to fail (we probably will soon desu) we were told to flash all drives and send all hardware back to sell it to recoup losses. Nobody, top to bottom of our company, is interested in keeping any of that code because the company is being run like shit by people who genuinely know nothing about video games but demand being involved in every step, thus we make games that none of us likes. Also every project is like 150GB on average and I'm not keeping all that shit on my personal drives.Having said that before this I worked at a company that ported old pc games and we've managed to dig up the source code for an expansion to a pretty famous PC strategy, that otherwise would've been lost. It was on some forgotten hard drive in some dudes garage literally across the world.>>1226699799iq post
>>12266980They should ask NintendoThey're good for that
>>12267015In case they want to port it to another system like a hand held.
>>12267543And why would they be thinking about doing that right after release?
>cyberconnect2>woops sorry lost the sourcecode and master disks but here's remasted G.U. with fucked progressionThe games that need a remaster the most will never get it
>>12267269>This. I work at a shovelware company98 IQ post. He's not asking why those companies didn't, he's asking why, by-and-large, they the entire Eastern industry didn't give a shit, when you have numerous examples from places like Atari, Sierra, IBM, and Activision that have records and notes and source codes dating back decades, unlike in Japan where everything is essentially just moth-balled. No one gives a flying rat's fucking shit in particular about YOUR special little snowflake place of employment, they're asking about general trends in the industry you cock-brained retard.
>>12267575Well actually, Atari threw out their documents and the original developers had to retrieve them from a dumpster.
>>12266980It doesn’t matter.
>>12267269I dont like the idea of losing development assets, but i honestly prefer the "ship it and it's done" mindset for game releases, atleast when its under the lens of "release a full experience right away" over just shit out something barely usable. Prefer it over the mindset of releasing something literally unfinished and fixing it later(if ever).
>>12267607That's later, when the company was beginning to go under, and undergoing transitions. They weren't throwing out their hard drives and design documents in 79 at their height.
>>12266980It's like they didn't consider my feelings at all when they made these decisions.
>>12267243
>>12267025saar, this is a retro games
>>12267558So they could more money probably.
>>12267614>but i honestly prefer the "ship it and it's done" mindset for game releases,Are people not aware that even physical games had multiple releases with big fixes?Gold cart ocarina of time is an example. It's the 1.1 of oot and there were later versions with changes.
>>12267243>weeb faggot reports me for calling out his retarded anime scienceKill yourself.Also, isn't the N64 such a cool console? :^)
>>12267109That's actually based though
>>12266980what'd you expect from a country that hates fair use and think its some sort of yokai curse?
>>12267109>leddit screencapGo back
>>12267243Keijo!!!!!!!! was so fucking good
>>12268141That's not the same thing. Of course revisions existed, but they were not exactly common and the ones that were usually had major changes to them that made it feel like two separate versions to an extent.(gold/grey oot, greatest hits ps stuff sometimes). You still had to release something with the mindset of "this is your first and only impression to make" and if you released shit, you were rightly known for it. Now, it's pretty much expected that all of the fine tuning, testing, even major changes to make something functional, will occur after the game has already been sold for full price, and it's become so common place that modern gamers just kinda accepted they will be receiving an unfinished product at launch.
>>12267575This shit is fucking tiresomeWow, some small literal who company that doesn't exist anymore didn't save production materials or source, unthinkable, who could have foreseen thisMeanwhile Taito, Sega, Nintendo, Namco, basically every company equivalent to the massive western publishers you're pointing to as godlike examples of preservation still kept all their shitYou have to remember that before FF7 Square wasn't a very big publisher and they were experiencing very real growing pains at the time,. I'm not surprised they lost stuff over the years
>>12267035>Usually porting a game to a new console required making it again from scratch due to the technology of the timeNihon Falcom has to the best example of this; games like Ys were farmed out to other studios without any included coding
>>12267243>the position of your tailbone makes your ass huge>says the people that believe personality types can be defined by their blood types
>>12267021I am a small time Japanese dev in 1981. All I do is churn out H games for the PC 88. Nobody gives a fuck and neither do I.
>>12267021B8 and bad faith post
>>12268303You're already on reddit
>>12267110Didn't he work at capcom too?
>>12267562Lol even the furfag devs fumbled?
>>12266980You will play it the way they intended. They do not care about game longevity at all, you can see this when Capcom was perplexed that people wanted to play OG RE2-4 even they intended for the remakes to replace the originals completely. Semi-related but this is why they never release games that can be modded and go to autistic lengths to prevent players from doing so.
>>12270268If you mean Kobayashi, he left game dev after Quintet to work for a credit card company and then went bankrupt (and he vanished).If you're talking about Hitoshi Ariga, yeah worked on MegaMans and even contributed to Pokemon designs
>>12269872These outsourced ports were done with the source code being given. That's how you got things like Dark Fact spoiling Feena's identity in the Famicom version of Ys 1, because it was already present in the PC-88 version's source code (confirmed by Iwasaki who directed the PCE CD one).
>>12266980
>>12267115Yeah, I remember some dev wrote to the yotuber that he has source code of Lego island, but he doesn't want to leak it, and it's mostly impossible to share legally
Why didn't conquistadors preserve the trinkets they sold to the natives?
>>12267997>alphalol. lol lol lol. lmao lmfao lololol
