Atari Games Unearths Priceless History
The virtual collection embodiment of Atari historian and arcade machine collector Scott Evans - formerly housed at SafeStuff.com - is incredibly important, containing a lot of incredibly rare prototypes and documentation built up over time and purchased after Atari Games' Milpitas office closed down a few years back.
So, the exciting news is that Scott is updating again on his new URL, AtariGames.com, after no updates through most of 2007, and he's posting absolutely amazing scans of documentation based around the creation of some of the most enduring Atari arcade games of all time.
For example, stored in the Document Library are PDFs including "Centipede Documentation. Over 60 pages of memos, design docs, field test reports and other interesting information" - with handwritten design suggestions from Atari execs - and the full Marble Madness design document, as well as rare info from the (pictured) proto-only sequel. Brilliant. [Via Atari Age.]
Comments
Brilliant indeed! And there even are some lovely Marble Madness docs too!
Posted by: gnome | February 6, 2008 6:17 AM
Interesting and unique stuff; too bad it's watermarked to crap.
Did you know that when someone scans in something, they "own" it and get to turn it into a DRM'd pile of ads and dung? I sure didn't, and still don't. Kudos on making the stuff available, boo on making it near-useless for future generations of Atari scholars for no good reason.
Posted by: Jason Scott | February 6, 2008 8:15 AM
Watermarking is dumb, Jason - I don't think I'd say it's 'near-useless' as a result. The value is still there in terms of reading the content - it's just excessive.
Posted by: simonc | February 6, 2008 8:59 AM
Reduces readability, messes up optical character recognition for later programs doing searches or analyzing text, advertises a site likely to be gone in 20 years - what's not to love?
I suppose we can live with old recordings of music artists with someone shouting "THIS IS FROM VINTAGEFORTIESMUSIC.COM" every 12 seconds, or maybe moon landing photos that have "MOONLANDINGPHOTOS.COM" across the face of them, but I wouldn't want them to be the sole recordings, now would I.
Posted by: Jason Scott | February 6, 2008 10:05 AM
Iwant to play classic 'atari' missile command
Posted by: manni gonzales | May 5, 2008 5:16 PM