I can’t remember the last time I kept anything in a shoebox. It may have been when I was but a mere brat and owned some Garbage Pale Kids trading cards. That was, like, 15 years ago. Maybe longer. In any case, a shoebox, while certainly a great means of storage for trading cards, isn’t exactly what I would consider a proper video game archive. Speaking on the PlayStation Blog, Guerrilla Games stated that in order to create the original Killzone in glorious HD, “direct retrieval” of the assets would have to be undertaken. This is quite tricky when you keep said assets in a shoebox.

“It was quite an interesting challenge,” said Senior Programmer Frank Compagner. “The first issue we ran into was that we no longer had a machine to read most of the tapes. And the second issue was that the tapes were stored, uh, offsite … By which I mean, in a shoebox in the cellar of one of our IT support staff members, without a list of contents of any kind. Like I said, we were young and we used to do things differently back in those days.”

I can’t stress enough how interesting it is that Guerrilla actually used to store Killzone assets in a shoebox, and without a written list of contents to boot! In other words, this stuff could have been lost. I’m sure many folks are glad that wasn’t the case. I mean, imagine the headlines: “Killzone Trilogy Delayed After Guerrilla Games Loses Shoebox with Original Killzone Assets.”

Follow this author on Twitter.