gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Japan's CEDEC conference is currently underway, and one of the panels they hosted yesterday was a joint presentation and roundtable discussion about the internal preservation efforts of four of Japan's most storied game publishers, chaired by Square-Enix's Yoichiro Miyake and featuring Taito's Yuichi Toyama, Sega's Yosuke Okunari and, making what may be their first public appearance as a preservation specialist, Capcom's Yasuyuki Makino.

CEDEC didn't stream this particular section but the media writeups are starting to come out (thx 4gamer!), so here's a rundown:


Square-Enix's "SAVE Project" initiative, helmed by Miyake (a prestigious AI researcher by trade), was initiated in the spring of 2020 with the keyword "materials as assets" and the goal of protecting and amassing dev materials that might otherwise be tossed by individuals. They've formed a list of specific dev materials that they're working to curate and disseminate to the public, which include an newly-penned upcoming academic paper revealing and analysing Dragon Quest IV's "Tactics" AI, and Miyake's aim with initiatives like these is to help cultivate a sense of history and pride within the company, help draw parallels between the activities of the past and the trends of the future in a manner that's commonplace in academia, and to shift the current philosophies around the significance of dev materials and preservation.

(SAVE's already revealed a lot of historical dev material to various JP outlets as part of this initiative; deliberately or no, it tends to come across as a PR campaign to whitewash their all-in attitude towards AI... that recent Portopia "remake" was their doing, to offer one particularly ugly example.)

Capcom manages an internal database called CIAS (Capcom Illustration Archive System), which hosts a massive catalogue of logos, key art, character illustrations, pixel art, icons etc for the purpose of hassle-free distribution and rights/licensing management—those with access to the database can request and/or approve use of any of the assets within with a single button, and assets like pixel art animations are packaged as layered PSD so as to make them easily malleable by collaborators or licensees who aren't familiar with animation or game development. Their archive includes a multitude of scans of analogue material like illustrations and film positives, which are digitised and colour-corrected with reference to the original material, and their digitising process is continuing to make advancements. Ultimately, they intend for their database to also include pitch/spec docs, cutscenes, audio, ROMs and other materials.

Having existed since 1953, Taito has naturally moved or relocated their headquarters multiple times in their history, and with every move they've lost or thrown away valuable material, but thanks to the efforts of the individuals managing each building, they have managed to preserve a lot of important material, including specific hardware and microfilm copies of documents. Yuichi shared a timeline of Taito's preservations efforts, which began in 2004 in tandem with the production of their Taito Memories series of compilations, but kicked off in earnest in 2018 when they began warehousing materials from their Ebina building and created a simple index of documents (as in, they photographed all the boxes); from there, the team behind the Egret II Mini started amassing and constructing custom boxes for individual Taito arcade games, and the Taito Milestones production team started actively unearthing dev documents to show publicly via the livestreams hosted by Arcade Archives/Milestones devs Hamster, and in 2021, they finally brought together all the disparate PCB stashes from various Taito divisions and consolidated them in one collection. Unlike parent company Square-Enix, there's no systematic company-wide preservation initiative, so every group within Taito goes about preservation in their own way.

(One interesting tidbit: Dariusburst was borne out of an aborted attempt to reissue the original arcade Darius in 2008—it wasn't until 2018's Darius Cozmic Collection that they were able to achieve something as seemingly straightforward as reissuing one of their marquee games!)

Sega's historically kept a lot of documents but they've never had a company-wide policy on preservation, so those collections were maintained on the whims of volunteer individuals within their respective departments, and so while some of the older or more unbroken departments had solid archives, the archival efforts of the various dev departments were naturally negatively effected by splits, mergers, consolidations, shifting/retiring personnel, etc. They finally initiated a formal preservation project in the spring of 2023, and they're not only handling the digitisation and formal warehousing of dev documents and printed art/material but also game data and hardware, including taikan arcade cabinets (some of which are kept in the lobby of their main building, and which are occasionally used for public exhibits). Their arcade hardware repair department is on top of managing EEPROM, but digitising materials has been a slow process—Sega was once in the home console business, after all, so the amount of material they have is truly massive, but they have digitised and commercialised/exhibited certain documents, like the hardware schematics for various consoles. Their physical archive is packed with a large variety of items: all variants of their home hardware and the complete global first-party software libraries (and the majority of, but not all, third-party games) but also many strange and rare items reflecting Sega's broad history, including the master reels for Takashi Miike's Ryu ga Gotoku movie. Okunari's next goal is to untangle the web of the various games, rights and IP owned by the broader Sega family in order to create a database of useful info and material—there are so many companies and catalogues under their umbrella that genuinely don't know precisely what or how many games they own in totality.

From there, Miyake hosted a discussion with the co-panelists; here are some tidbits:

  • Capcom's decades-old archive is almost solely the work of Shoei Okano, the founder and continued head of Capcom's internal design room—they made it a personal mission to archive and catalogue Capcom's material, and it's long been tradition for retiring employees to hand over their personal stash to Okano before they leave.

  • Makino brings up that the company expects to see profits and concrete benefits from archival efforts, so projects like the recent Street Fighter 35th public exhibitions were held in the service of publicising and spurring discussion about the value of the old material (ie using them for brand marketing, essentially). On Toyama's part, he mentioned that there was a time when Taito didn't value their old works but, thanks to the foresight of some of his predecessors who made individual efforts to keep old materials, they're currently able to reissue their old catalogue, so for those companies who expect to maintain their IP into the future, he strongly encourages them to seriously pursue their own preservation efforts. Miyake says that initiating their formal preservation project has spread awareness of the need for proper preservation within the company and now, as with Capcom, people are actively volunteering dev materials to his department; he wants companies to view the value of these initiatives in a more holistic sense, rather than evaluating them strictly in terms of profit.

  • Okunari acknowledges that Miyake's public-facing preservation activities have raised the profile and cultural significance of preservation efforts in the public eye, and that when he's been out doing PR for Sega's own legacy efforts, he's been hit up by people looking to submit their own old materials for proper archival (including invaluable stuff like the pitch documents for Outrun!): as individual preservation efforts continue to make progress, the broader momentum for preservation should hopefully increase, so companies should keep at it and keep publicising their work. On his part, Okunari's become the "company police box" for people within the Sega family looking for materials on older games, and he sees this as evidence of the growing awareness of their preservation efforts.

  • On the internal sentiments about each company's preservation efforts: Makino says Capcom's not indifferent, exactly, but they don't really hear strong opinions either way, and that seeing the fruits of their work is what spurs people to get involved. Peoples' attitudes tend to be dictated by their relation to the company—the veterans don't think twice about old dev materials, but younger folk or mid-career hires get excited about material from classic games, and it's those people who tend to be most excited and proactive about the archive.

  • Okunari's witnessed similar attitudes at Sega: many of the veterans were proudly forward-facing and weren't interested in making sequels or returning to old games, and people who'd joined from other companies would often be taken aback by how little value they seemed to have for their old works, and projects like the Mega Drive Mini and the upcoming Crazy Taxi reboot are the fruits of that external perspective. He also brings up how their archival efforts unearthed unknown or forgotten aspects of their history—for example, their work on acquiring a ROM for Rainbow Islands Extra for the Genesis Mini 2 clued them into the details of the Sega Channel, the US initiative for distributing Genesis games via a cable TV line, so their archival efforts made a concrete effort in strengthening the historical foundation of their past work.

  • Makino also highlights the importance of involving veterans in the preservation process: he gives one example where he came across a box of documents for the obscure PS2 adventure game Glass no Bara (Glass Rose), and it was the intuition and enthusiasm of his veteran co-worker that got them to investigate the contents, which ended up turning up early dev documents for Monster Hunter. Brute-forcing through archives is one thing, but the knowledge and lived history of these veterans can be the biggest key to discovering or preserving invaluable history.

The message they left off with was that historical preservation should be an industry-wide initiative, so if other companies want to start their own initiatives, they should get in touch.


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

I love to hear about this! Thanks for translating and highlighting interesting bits!

In an ideal world, every one of these guys would make some ultimate interactive museum game/experience with these materials, like a crazy high budget modern version of the old PS1 Namco Museum games.

This is nice to read regarding these companies (even if there's clear self interest in it) are finally kicking into the gear of archiving but also unravelling their IP so they can actually offer it to people for use.