Case Study: Hidden Path Entertainment achieves dramatic performance and robust disaster recovery with Perforce Helix Core

Hidden Path Boosts Their Game From SVN to Helix Core

Hidden Path Entertainment is an independent video game developer founded by CTO Michael Austin. After early success with titles like Defense Grid and a new partnership with Valve that added roughly 20 million files, the team outgrew its Subversion setup: TortoiseSVN tree scans would lock workstations and a 120 GB checkout of 5–6 million files routinely took about two hours. Hidden Path needed a scalable, reliable version-control solution.

In 2009 they moved to Perforce Helix Core and saw immediate, dramatic gains — the same large get now completes in under five minutes. Helix’s metadata-in-database design improved performance and disaster recovery (an accidental uninstall was recovered by a simple reinstall), and the system has scaled to a ~600 GB repository with ~70 users across time zones. Additional features (shelving, proxies) and responsive Perforce support further stabilized workflows and reduced admin overhead.

Hidden Path Entertainment

Michael Austin

CTO and Co-founder, Hidden Path Entertainment