Week 4: Case study: excavating Meridian Drift
One PC game, excavated start to finish — the course's recurring reference case study, as a deck
15 March 2027
Week 4 is a single worked example, run start to finish as a deck rather than
a page: what’s known about Meridian Drift going in, what a surviving beta
build actually contains, how its .mdpak archive was read (week 3’s
technique, applied for real), what ran and what didn’t under emulation, and
what’s still missing.
This is the case study the rest of the semester keeps returning to — its save-file format comes back in week 5, and its publisher’s collapse is a running example in week 6’s ethics discussion. Your own studio artifact in week 8 won’t be this one, but the shape of the investigation — evidence, attempt, result, gaps — is the shape every recovery report in this course follows.
Outline#
- what’s publicly known about Meridian Drift before opening a single file
- the beta build: contents, condition, and what’s missing
- the recovery attempt, and where it succeeded and where it didn’t
- turning the attempt into evidence, on the page
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor