09 - The forgotten Fantasy?
Despite 20 years of waiting for the game, not all fantasies were fulfilled.
The PlayStation 1 RPG games Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX developed by SquareEnix (at that time still Squaresoft) are considered the "golden era" of Final Fantasy history and many new games still have to compete with them. Nevertheless, SquareEnix has been silent for a long time about why the eighth installment of the series was never properly set up for PC or a current generation of consoles - although this was done with almost every other part of the series.
The answer was easy and emerged through a series of interviews: The raw data (background images, music, 3D models etc.) and the finished source code of the game had simply not been archived. In the 90s there were fewer AAA titles (large projects that ran over several years) and games were produced at shorter intervals. As with Square, this meant that space had to be freed up again and again for new projects and little attention was paid to old project data. As a result, all Final Fantasy VIII project data was lost and a new version of the game could only be released in 2019 in collaboration with other companies.
Although there are now many "remastered" versions of the Final Fantasy games at that time, most of which have been re-programmed, the lack of raw data is still a problem for the developers and the gaming community. For example, the background graphics of the games were created in high resolution, but only the compressed versions for the consoles of the time were stored. Due to today's HD displays, those are no longer up-to-date.
This example shows how important it is to archive both the raw data and the actual project data. Publishing or completing a project should not mean the end of the data life cycle. Only when the raw and result data is properly organized can follow-up projects re-use the data and previous work be appreciated.