Yes. Even if the tapes had not been erased, it would have been difficult if not impossible to get it back after that amount of time. About 5 years ago I helped

Yes. Even if the tapes had not been erased, it would have been difficult if not impossible to get it back after that amount of time. About 5 years ago I helped a team migrate a bunch of data from ~30 year old 9-track tape reels. Obtaining and restoring hardware that was even capable of reading the reels was hard enough (we are talking spending thousands of dollars purchasing zero-warranty equipment from sketchy places on the 'net that had a few sitting in some dusty corner of their warehouse). We also had to write our own software to read the tapes until an error occurred; reset the drive, retry reading from that spot again, and so on, and then concatenate all of the chucks together. Most of the reels were eventually readable this way, but there still ended up being a not insignificant number that were given up on after several failed attempts.