PlayStation's preservation project is in full swing

Few things are more important in modern gaming than preservation, and Sony has been at the forefront of that effort for some time, going so far as to store the archived files in a mine shaft that very few people have access to.

On the heels of his PlayStation Preservation Project making waves, Garrett Fredley, Senior Build Engineer of IP Preservation at PlayStation, took to social media to share that the effort won't be stopping anytime soon.

“PlayStation's conservation journey is underway, and we're not looking to stop anytime soon,” wrote Fredley on Bluesky. “Being able to share our vision, work, hopes and dreams with Sony's leadership was a special moment for our team, and I'm excited to see where we go from here.”

Alongside the post, Fredley shared the project's logo, which for any longtime PlayStation fan should have some pretty familiar faces.

That logo features Sly Cooper front and back, along with Daxter from Jak & Daxter, Helghast from Killzone, and a monkey from Ape Escape, among other PlayStation icons.

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Ghost of Tanuki.

As Push Square noted, the logo doesn't exactly mean any of these franchises will be making a comeback. But it shows how valuable they are in Sony's eyes, and archiving material related to their previous development can be useful later, whether it's a re-release or a new project.

PlayStation will go to great lengths to preserve its history

A year ago, Fredley spoke at GDC to describe the massive endeavor, one that has over 200 million files preserved.

“PlayStation Studios Vault is our solution to bringing together all of PlayStation's rich, 30-year history in one place,” Fredley said during a GDC keynote. “Not just backups, not just source code and source code, but everything that was ever related to a project we can possibly find, from documentation to audio assets and prototype information, everything under the sun.”

Everything related to a game's development, including the construction itself, is preserved and sent to “staging vaults” in Las Vegas and Liverpool. From there things are sent to the vault itself, where things are stored on data tapes.

“All 30 years of history are in our tape backups,” Fredley said.

The data tapes are then stored in mine shafts that only a select few have access to, including members of the preservation team and the IT department. Anyone who wants access to the archives must go through them.

At the time of the GDC talk, the oldest game on record that had been archived was 1994's Arc the Lad, with PS5 titles in particular being added all the time.