The Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, New York, announced earlier this week that it had acquired a sizeable collection of development materials from the Saint's Row studio Volition.
This collection was reportedly donated to the museum by former "Volitionites" and is said to include "thousands of game builds, some source material, documentation, awards, and props".
This includes items related to the company's groundbreaking 1995 first-person 3D shooter Descent (from back when the company was called Parallax Software), various pieces from the development of the Red Faction games, and, of course, a treasure trove of development materials related to the Saint's Row series, such as early builds and cancelled projects.
The news was shared online by Andrew Borman, the director of Digital Preservation who wrote that, "It's been a pleasure working on the initial processing of the collection, and discovering the history of such a pioneering company."
As he noted in a video released alongside the announcement, "There's much work to be done organizing, cataloguing, and migrating data from optical disk and other storage formats" before it will be publicly displayed or shared with the researchers. However, he hopes to be able to share more information about the collection in the future.
Volition, as you may already be aware, originally emerged out of Parallax Software, a company founded in Champaign, Illinois, by the developers Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog.
Over the years, it achieved considerable success both in the first-person shooter and open-world genres but after a couple of underperforming titles and a dizzying amount of acquisitions, the company ended up being shuttered in 2023, as part of a larger restructuring within its parent company, Embracer Group.