No, nonsense. Publishers keep everything, certainly the publishers I've worked for. Sierra is one of the oldies that, to my slightly out of date knowledge, still curates an archive of almost every asset for every game they've released. I'm certain the source for some of the earliest titles have been lost due to their hobbyist nature, but I've personally seen a raw list of the available archive that included games released from 1980 onward.
I personally know of games well into the late 90's where all or parts of the source code has been lost by the very major recognizable companies who built them. AAA titles even at the time.
A few of these games have been re-released later, and in some of those cases old engineers had to be tracked down who still had the source code laying around in their personal archives.
I imagine this is very common, considering some of the titles I've witnessed this happen to. If games will those types of budgets and followings were lost, I can't imagine the vast long-tail of the industry being any better. Plus there were far more independent studios at the time who later "made it big" only to flame out. I expect the vast majority of content created during this timeframe is permanently lost.
These days with the advance of business types understanding the long-term value of IP, I expect this is much better controlled by whomever is underwriting the cost of development. I believe this likely to be a bad thing - as you'll see more lawsuits over old games in the future.
This may be true of publisher in-house development teams, but I've seen and worked at third party studios that do little to nothing about post-release archival, a fact connected to having minimal IT controls and the end of a project often resulting in a massive layoff. Things get lost in the dust-up; dev kits get lent out from a publisher for one project and then aren't returned. The build server gets "reused". The same version control repo is used to ship two different games sharing the same engine. One coder stays behind after the rest of the team has been let go or moved to something else, in order to fix bugs, so he's the only one with the most up-to-date build. What is left over is a mishmash of project artifacts but no guarantee that "project K at point in time T" can be reconstructed in full.
And with some of those Sierra projects, their archival might have all the assets they could find; that doesn't mean they have all the assets.
Counter to this; I work at one of the biggest game publishers in the world, and the assets and source for one of it's most famous games from the mid-90s simply doesn't exist anymore.
I'm not going to say it doesn't happen, discs always seemed to get lost under piles of paper and eventually wind up sitting in a drawer somewhere, only to be thrown out when that persons office is vacated.
I'm happy to hear it, then. Do they also keep copies of the toolchains needed to build all of them? What is their storage infrastructure like, and what do they do to ensure it survives employee turnover and corporate reorganization?
I can't speak for Sierra as I don't know how they store their archive, but I've always found it interesting that some publishers (mostly music and movie really) use facilities such as this http://www.undergroundvaults.com/about-us/hutchinson/
Oh how do i WANT to get my hands on that Caesar III source code now. This game was so incredibly fantastic, it just needed some bug fixes. And if someone were to start developing DLCs for it (think Paradox), I'd be all over that…
To me, that would be the main reason to release old source code. Though I understand the legal stuff is hairy, and people don't generally do it for that reason.
