[Update: A spokesperson on behalf of Hasbro got back to us with this comment:
“To clarify, comments that suggest TRANSFORMERS games have been lost were made in error. We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion; they’ve been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together.”
Meanwhile, Lulu Chenge Meservey at Activision Blizzard also Tweeted a correction.
These headlines are wrong.
We have the code, it’s not lost and never was. pic.twitter.com/9Rr24FUlhb— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) August 1, 2023
Does that mean a Transformers collection could be on the way? Probably not. Maybe someday in the future, though. Our original story follows.]
Speaking with the publication Transformer World, a Hasbro representative has revealed that Activision Blizzard currently doesn’t know the whereabouts of the source code for the various Transformers games that they were in charge of publishing.
It’s happened to the best of us. I’m not sure of the whereabouts of some of my dog’s puppy pictures, and I have a suspicion they were on a thumb drive that I formatted. However, while Zero is a good boy who deserves his life to be chronicled in as much detail as possible, I am not a multi-billion dollar corporation, and he is not a media production that cost millions of dollars and hours of human labor to produce. If I was and he was, I probably would have been a little more fastidious when it came to storing that data.
The representative explained, “Sadly, apparently Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building. When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating. Hope is that now that the deal is moving forward with Microsoft and Xbox that they’ll go through all of the archives and every hard drive to find it all, because it’s an easy Game Pass add. We want those games back up for people to have a chance to play.”
Note that the representative didn’t say that the games were destroyed or irretrievable, simply that they were supposedly misplaced. The games include Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark, and Transformers Devastation. The last of those titles came out in 2015.
Robot irretrievable
Okay, so mistakes happen. However, I worked in I.T. for 9 years, and my inner technician is screaming about how a proper backup architecture could have averted this. I’m not any sort of Transformers fan and have never had any interest in these games. It just baffles me that a corporation with the size and influence of Activision Blizzard could drop valuable data between the couch cushions. It’s like when the government sends mail to an address you haven’t lived at for multiple tax and voting seasons.
I’m just saying someone has a responsibility and that someone dropped the ball.
At the very least this reveals that Hasbro is interested in a re-release of the Activision published titles. Hopefully, someone will find the hard drives stuffed in with the rest of the sensitive data stored temporarily beside the toilet. I kind of find it funny that the representative is hoping that the Microsoft deal will go through with faith that they’ll do a better job of housekeeping. I mean, at the very least, Microsoft has backup servers.
We’ve reached out to Activision for comment. If we hear back, we will update this article with their response.
