All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

From CanuckPlay on the Maximum Football Discord regarding APF 2K8.

Q: If someone could acquire 2Ks football engine and get the gameplay from APF... man. First time I ever played APF 2K8 was today and oh man is it good.

CanuckPlay A: "I spoke to one of the senior executives at 2k about 4 years ago about licensing their source. It took them 3 weeks just to figure out where it was. It's not something they maintain or even keep track of. Once they did figure out where it was. I was told that they don't license out any of their content to anyone (unless you purchased the whole company).

The tools they used to create the game are obsolete and do not work on new operating systems. The file system they used was proprietary and to generate them you needed to use special plugins - which are no longer supported and the software they plugged into is obsolete. The graphics API used is no longer supported on any platform. It would need to be replaced.

There is nobody left at the studio that understands the game logic. One of the developers that worked on 2k8 is actually dead.

None of the current game engines - unity or unreal - that I would have access too support the animation system that 2k uses. They've built a game engine and animation system designed for sports games. Unreal and Unity have animation engines designed for mobile games and first person shooters.
Could that stuff be updated? Sure, probably, with a lot of work and time. But they don't license out their stuff anyway so it's all moot."

Do you guys believe TTWO/2K/Visual Concepts would be this careless?

The highlighted guys (some un-highlighted) are the ones who are still at Visual Concepts and worked on NFL 2K, APF 2K8, and now work on NBA 2K Series.

2KFootballNow

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

Whether they can or can't get it back, it won't be what you see in whatever this next iteration of 2K Football is. So many people's hype seemes to be centered around the expectation of All Pro Football: The Sequel, or NFL 2K5, the sequel, 15 years in the making. It isn't going to happen. Those teams are gone, most of the employees are gone, the engine is gone. It's over with. Sadly. I'm not saying a new sim football game can't be made that is as good, or even better. But someone is going to have to put in that work, and take on the same philosphy that made those games great. I don't know if that will happen in todays climate, with what companies value and cater to.

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

It's their proprietary software. I'm missing the point where it could be considered careless.

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

I actually updated the list and made it easier to read, below I highlighted all the individuals from the NBA 2K20 credits that appear in the APF 2K8 credits. 2K is under no obligation to say anything correct to Canuck or to any other competitor and there is no way they would ever sell it. Sounded like they don’t want people asking about it, so they basically told them it’s a lost cause to look into it.

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

The game is 13 years old. This isn't careless, the game would have to basically be rebuilt from the ground up anyway to work on modern systems and hardware so the old source is basically useless.

2k hasn't had a reason to keep the code around in over a decade. It was probably sitting on some old backup drive in storage somewhere.

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

Interesting read. NBA2k21 was rebuilt from the ground up so a new 2k football game would no doubt require the same approach. Between NBA 2k and WWE 2k (set for a 2021 return and likely being rebuilt as well), I'm not sure when or how Visual Concepts would be able devote the resources to development of a new APF type game. There's always a glimmer of hope I suppose but it is a glimmer at the absolute best.

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

Two separate but related thoughts:

1 - Game development tools have changed a lot over the past decade. I'm a little surprised Canuck Play received such a candid response, but I'm not really surprised by the content of that response with respect to the decayed state of code base of their older games. I'm also not surprised that Take 2 wasn't interested in licensing source code or open-sourcing their game.

2 - The companies at the top of the video games industry - particularly AAA and first-party companies - historically have not shown much if any interest in the idea of preservation. Any interest they have shown is an incredibly recent development. That the code base is as decayed as it reportedly is is only carelessness in the most literal sense - no one at VC cared about preserving All Pro Football 2K8 for years upon years. That is most certainly not a problem unique to Visual Concepts or APF 2K8.

If you're interested, here's a 45-minute talk from GDC 2019 by an engineer at Electronic Arts about all the headaches he had to go through to preserve some of EA's older games. It's a lot of work for no immediate monetary return. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of AAA game studios still aren't doing this work.

Re: All Pro Football 2K8 Source Code
 

To be clear, is the implication here that in 2016 2K lied about the status of the code of their then nine-year-old game in an attempt to stop other developers from asking about it?

And that...these tools really had been maintained for nearly a decade just in case they secured a deal to put out an NFL game four or five years later?