A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

The only realistic answer is that they did not, themselves, still have their own data archived. Now, this is not the case for all companies. Nintendo in particular are *meticulous* about preservation. Some Virtual Console releases were better dumps than the available ones.

At the end of the day, the fact that the existence of MAME, even in its infancy at the time, had encouraged people to maintain a global "redundant backup" of the data it documented, was how these companies still had their data available when they wanted to re-release it.

This absolutely isn't intended to go all holier-than-thou on other projects, or other preservation teams. There are ones that are amazing, like the CD-i community, and the Internet Archive folks.

Hidden Palace as well, they do deep-dives into what they get, then release it. Amazing folks. All the same, there are many who hold things to their chest for months, even years, until they get a chance to use that data for their own self-promotion.

Ultimately, if your so-called preservation team is one bad day, one failed hard drive, one missed domain re-registration, or one cloud backup away from not having anything at all preserved, re-think what you claim to be dedicated to, because it isn't what you think.

Just as a final post-script, a point that I omitted: If you're just building up archives of boards, of discs, of floppies, you're not preserving anything. Bit-rot is a thing. Disc rot is a thing. Magnetic coercivity going down over time is a thing.

Unless you can be absolutely sure that your archive is documented, with wide hashes, and backed up across countless machines such that nothing short of an apocalyptic event would make it unavailable, it hasn't been preserved. Release, or become equally lost.