The publishing company often deleted it after the game shipped, thinking it just took up space.

Floppy disks were not cheap, expensive, easy to get, or reliable. It sucked.

Even on the U.S. east coast, I remember having to travel over an hour to get to the nearest store that sold floppy disks. Each BASF FlexyDisk cost $18 in 2026 money. So $50 if you wanted redundant long-term storage of one program.

That's why we printed everything out all the time; especially for archive storage.

…which also turned out to be a bad idea. Just in a different way.