kaneda2004One lucky gamer stumbled across an unusual PS4 related item recently – at a bankruptcy auction of all places.
It’s not every day you find a PlayStation 4 development after all, not least one full of unreleased data from United Front – the now closed developers of Sleeping Dogs.
United Front games actually shut down back in October, leading to an auction to sell all manner of their gear and office equipment.
While much of the auction was taken up by stuff like standard office crap, lamps, and TV sets, the PlayStation 4 dev kit (which is the hardware Sony sends to developers so that they can make games), was purchased Reddit’s kaneda2004.
Obviously a dev kit is a pretty cool collector’s item in its own right – especially since it seems to be a newer NEO dev kit made to help games run better on the PS4 Pro.
What’s really cool though, is that there’s around 800GB of content on there sitting behind an expired DevKit license – what could it be?
Unfortunately, kaneda2004 can’t access the mystery files, as they’re built to encrypt once the license expires, presumably to stop thieves/lucky auction buyers getting stuck into the data in situations like this.
Thankfully, the dev kit’s new owner isn’t the sort to call it quits at a pesky bit of encryption. He’s instead he’s reached out to the members of Assembler Games, who plan to take the dev kit and try to extract some of the files hidden within.
The aim here isn’t just to be nosy either – they intend to take whatever is on the HDD and save whatever United Front were working on from being lost to obscurity.
Of course, it could be absolutely nothing of note – but could you really sit back and not try to find out what’s really in there?
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.