Sony’s new game preservation engineer at PlayStation has clarified what his role at the company means after the preservation team was unceremoniously revealed earlier this week.
Officially a “senior build engineer” at PlayStation, Garrett Fredley announced earlier this week that he was hired for the company’s “newly created game preservation team”. The announcement can be found on both his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
Yesterday (April 27) Fredley decided to clarify what his role actually means, as he said he “broke the internet” when announcing his new job.
Whilst it was assumed that Fredley’s work concerned emulation when his job was first announced, he said in a tweet thread that this isn’t the case at the moment.
According to Fredley, it is yet to be decided “on whether I’ll have much of a role to play personally in any emulation work, although I’ll share what I can if it comes up,” with him adding that “it’s only my second day” at the company.
So apparently I broke the internet announcing my work with Playstation
For anyone asking what Game Preservation is / what I do, I did a GDC talk a few years ago on the subject when I worked at EA. My work is similar, although larger in scopehttps://t.co/mWNW5u8uXF
— Garrett Fredley (@SomeCronzaGuy) April 26, 2022
Fredley then shared a talk he did at GDC 2019 while he worked at EA, with him adding that his current “work is similar, although larger in scope” than what he did back then.
In Fredley’s line of work, game preservation refers to making sure games can return after up to 100 years in storage. This means that all the tools, raw data and code are stored together so said games can be remade from the ground up, with all the data intact, instead of it being one file on a hard drive.
During the GDC talk, Fredley also notes that games are preserved like this as “there’s value in what we can bring them back for”.
In other news, ex-Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aimé has expressed interest in the gaming opportunities presented by the blockchain.
The post PlayStation engineer details work of Sony’s new preservation team appeared first on NME.
