While doing research for game development and creative narrative preservation groups, I came across a ゲームメーカーズ report on the presentation, “The Cutting Edge of Preserving Game Development Materials Archive – ゲーム開発資料の保存の最先端” at SIGGRAPH ASIA ’24, featuring 4 popular Japanese development companies sharing their process and efforts in game development preservation and archival.

Some highlights:

• Square Enix started SAVE: Save Our Materials project during the pandemic in 2020
• CAPCOM and its digital asset management system, CIAS (Capcom Illustrations Archive System). Their goal is to store art (currently available), videos (PVs and CMs), sound, design docs, and ROMS and make them available for retrieval, or in their words, “Search, View, Use”. I wish they had this when I was working the PS3/XBOX360 port of Marvel vs. Capcom 2!
• TAITO had impressive photos of all the analog and deterioriating artifacts they need to catch up on digitizing, including items on microfiche. Every game title had its own archivist/preservationist who stored and organized the materials.
• SEGA does not know the number, or maybe even what, titles they actually own the rights to!
• Final points:
  • Organizing materials in the past will allow it further development in the future.
  • Materials in the past allows us to know how to move forward with present day development.
  • It is worth tracing the past to predict the future
  • The company can take pride in its history
  • There is value in all kinds of work, and it’s worth making a process to tie all that work together.
  • What results is a game industry that can be studied academically

It’s great to know that companies and studios are finding value in their preservation efforts, but it seems they are still figuring out how best to archive for retrieval and practical use. There is research on how special librarians are trained by their organizations and how to make it better. Much of it, like most things, is on-the-job from senpai, but additional off-site education would provide foundational and wider understanding of the purpose of their work.

One of the most important concepts in library science and issues in archival is metadata for license rights and provenance, the record of origin of an asset or artifact, so I was just as surprised as SEGA to learn about their own internal issues of tracking their properties. In general, it would be interesting to see  what metadata standards SquareEnix and Capcom are implementing and what profiles of users they are building for.