In the early days of the BBC it was decided that keeping video was unimportant. It was expensive to store, it was never re-run and there was no way to see a time when people would be able to run it in their home. As a result, countless hours of famous well-loved British TV – Dad's Army, Dr Who, The Goon Show, The Likely Lads, Hancock's Half Hour and much more – has disappeared, probably forever. You'd have thought, considering that this isn't an issue exclusive to the BBC or English TV as a whole, that we'd have learnt our lesson, especially now that digital storage is cheap and takes up practically no space.
Konami decided at some point after the release of Silent Hill 2 that there was no point in keeping the data and so they wiped the finished game from storage. As a result, it took developer Hyjinx two years, the same amount of time it took to build the game in the first place, to prepare it for the HD Collection. Talking with 1UP for a very interesting article on preserving assets and HD Collections, producer Tomm Hulett explained the problems they'd had.
"We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn't the final release version of the games!
"During debug we didn't just have to deal with the expected 'porting' bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we'd never seen before."
He added: "I think at one point [Silent Hill 3 protagonist] Heather was blue."
