Guerrilla have admitted that parts of the original Killzone (for PlayStation 2) were found in an old shoebox, when the team was asked to dig up the source so that work could commence on bringing the game to the PS3.
“I was asked to dig up the source code and the original assets for the game,” says senior programmer Frank Compagner. “We knew direct retrieval of the assets was going to be tricky.”
“The first issue we ran into was that we no longer had a machine to read most of the tapes,” he said, before admitting that the “offsite” storage system was “a shoebox in the cellar of one of our IT support staff members.”
Also of note is the revelation that Rico Velasquez was originally going to be an Asian character. “The code and header files,” said Frank, “most of them referred to him by a different name because he started out as an Asian character during development.”
We first heard of a Killzone HD game back in January, before it was swiftly brushed under the carpet. It’s now part of a trilogy, launching soon.
bunimomike
Ha! Trust the IT industry to have nothing more exciting in your cellar than some old code. I miss the old days where you’d be guaranteed body parts and at least seven unidentifiable liquids.
KeRaSh
Haha, I’m going to suggest shoeboxes as a new type of storage system during our next IT meeting. :D
Paulo Vinicius Radtke
I just wonder what was the source code doing at the “offsite storage facility”, and how someone checked out Guerrilla with a shoe box full of magnetic tapes or DVDs with the source code. Not to mention backing up stuff on tapes and sending away the tape readers, really clever way to keep the source code a secret. Reality is so much stranger than fiction, was that a movie plot I’d laugh at the screen writers.
TSBonyman
Looking forward to it and i guess if they couldn’t access the original code and assets they would have to start from scratch and it might not be the same.
mcphatty
Tapes?! I’m intreagued.
Paulo Vinicius Radtke
That was in 2004, so there were no BluRay discs available to store the backups and DVDs where too small to hold up all the files of a large project like Killzone. DAT tapes where used quite often to store large amounts of data in very small spaces and at a fair price. It looks odd now that a 500GB external hard drive is inexpensive, but at that time, it wasn’t so strange. The strange part is getting read of the tape readers, which means no one actually expected to even look at those files at a later date, which makes the backup pointless :).
mcphatty
Thats amazing! Thanks for the history lesson :) I guess tapes would have been cheaper than endless 80GB hard drives, and take up less shoe box space. Makes you wonder where the Windows 3.1 source code will turn up, probably on vinyl or those punched cards haha.
ljc1976
A lot of companies still use tape backups today for a number of reasons. In fact tape technology is still being developed with capacities growing all the time (5TB+)
I imagine in Guerrilla’s decision to to ditch the tape drives they assumed they would never need whatever they had archived to tape, in which case it was shortsighted. Otherwise it was just incompetent :-)
KeRaSh
Yeah, I’ve never heard of a large company that uses Blu-Ray as their main backup media. Newer LTO tapes are much faster and have significantly larger capacities.
hazelam
somebody tell Sega to check their cellars, maybe they can find the source for Panzer Dragoon Saga.
then maybe i will actually be able to play past the first disc.
JohnnyBoy
As a commercial software developer we have to put our source into escrow in case we go bust or stop supporting a particular version, but I guess games are different.
ohmikkie
Yeah I was thinking that. I think all the companies I’ve work for, past and present do that.