https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/apr/07/uncovering-the-hidden-history-of-bestselling-video-games

Hundreds of rare PlayStation 2 demos have been uncovered and archived, revealing how favourite games were developed

If you worked on video game magazines in the 90s, there was one sight you got used to pretty quickly. On every desk, in every drawer, there were dozens of DVD-R discs with the titles of games scrawled on them with Sharpies. These were the prerelease versions of games that were sent to us by developers to preview and review. We’d play them on debug consoles (the machines used by developers to build and test games), write our thoughts, then chuck the discs in a pile, or a bin.