ubersaurus

1982's series of Star Raiders clones continues with Activision's StarMaster - probably my personal favorite out of all of them and one of the finest games on the platform!

Might've been my video! When I interviewed Bob Smith back in 2021 this is what he said: I'm pretty sure both Bob Smith and Rob Zdybel have talked about this issue in their Portland Retro Game Expo appearances, if you want to check out those panels sometime on YouTube.

I've had the chance to guest host the Retronauts podcast a few times over the past year, and this was one of my favorite ones to record. I had the opportunity to interview Oscar Groosman and Ton Kemmere, formerly of Philips, about selling the Videopac in non-US territories, the Europe-only pieces of hardware, etc. Hope it is as informative for ya'll as it was for me! https://retronauts.com/article/2201/retronauts-episode-588-videopac-insiders

We've now reached June 1982, and the pace of releases picks up dramatically from here on through 1984. Kicking things off, however, we have one of the most popular Atari VCS releases: a home conversion of one of the most popular *coin-op* games of all time, Defender! And Chopper Command is here as well, as a Defender clone released the same month. We're delving into their origins and reviews right here!

Yeah, this sort of digital access approach would absolutely be ideal. Obviously VGHF hired someone specifically to get that set up with Phil, but this will be a thoroughly excellent resource. I do know a number of the scans they have were done by the folks at Gaming Alexandria, who have talked informally about being interested in going down to the NVM and helping scan and organize their materials. If they're amenable to it that'd be a good first step.

No, I totally understand why they don't have a space you can check out research materials in at the moment. It just also sucks a lot for researchers when they also actively seek out paper materials that disappear into the ether. My best example is Jerome Domurat's materials - they received everything he had. One of the items he had, according to Warshaw, was a printout of Atari's internal sales tracking. A clip of it is in the Once Upon Atari documentaries. I'd LOVE to see the full thing - and if it's anywhere now, it's with them!

There's nothing to suggest that they don't have the data, or that the BSR would be prickly about it if requested. The chain of ownership is pretty clear cut who had it given that their own website indicates they showed off their unreleased games at CGE years ago. It's also kind of unclear if Intellivision Productions actually bought the M-Network rights off the BSR and then resold them to Atari, or if Atari bought em off the BSR direct; either way they'll have been paid. Like yeah, they could be fussy about it if Atari doesn't have the data, but what would it actually get them other than the kind of legal trouble they were trying to avoid not putting the roms out in the first place? Generally though, yes - if a prototype is in private hands that's unwilling to share, then that becomes a problem for rights-holders wanting to do something with it (obviously Akka Arrh is only on Atari 50 because a dump of the proto board turned up under "circumstances"). I just also see no reason why this is an example you'd latch onto.

So a likely sticking point with some of this material is that Activision does technically own those games, which means now Microsoft owns em. Some of the old time programmers don't want to incur the wrath of a major corporation nowadays for an old game. Similarly I don't think the BSR folks are willing to risk opening themselves up legally (though now that Atari owns both the M-Network library and the Stern library, in theory they could reissue Anteater any time they want, and probably have more money to make some of the others possible too). There *is* a DCMA exemption hearing later this year where some groups are going to argue for remote access to video games by museums and libraries that are not commercially available, something very few museums and libraries are really equipped to do but that the NVM would likely be very well placed for given the bevy of stuff they have. I don't necessarily need to have a copy of Keystone Cannonball but being able to "rent" it on a website for an hour or something would cover me well. If they can get that carveout (which all other kinds of software already have based on the last DMCA exemption cycle) I think that'd be a game changer for these archives. My only lament with the NVM is that they currently have no way for researchers to go through their archive for research. I'd love to spend a week going through their Atari, CommaVid, etc. papers and memos, either in person or through some kind of web interface. Being able to go through RCA papers at the Hagley Museum or Atari and Fairchild documents at the Strong were massively helpful for my work - same with delving into Bally related papers on ballyalley.com.

I'll add that Frank also said that the VGHF is working with the owner of the other Tarzan copy on a release, so by all rights, it should be along!

May 1982's the focus of the new Atari Archive. Specifically, the strange coincidence of two games themed around space insects dropping at the same time in Yars' Revenge and Cosmic Swarm. Weirdly, the one that reviewed best is not the one you'd expect!

It occurs to me that I should probably note when I have a new Intellivision video in this forum thread, huh? Well since that first one, I've done three more (the newest one just this past week). They're not super popular, but I enjoy delving into the Intellivision library every so often, so I'll probably be keeping this up for the foreseeable future every few months.

Alas, not yet! Hoping to sit down with the publisher after the new year and see if we can work out the details - I know they're interested but won't have the bandwidth until then to hash that out. I'd hope for 2025 if all goes smoothly?

As a follow up to this, I think van der Wal's dates were misaligned - I looked back through the photos of memos i took from Hagley and his name is on a number of them for the summers of 1977 and 78 - so it's possible that he did do Biorhythm and such for the VIP and they got converted to the Studio III. Still no idea who actually did the conversions of them, though! I've sent out a couple more letters over the weekend, so fingers crossed for some new information from some of the old developers out there.

It's been a minute, but I finally had the opportunity to speak with Gooitzen van der Wal about his time working for RCA on the COSMAC VIP! A quick rundown of the highlights that may be of interest here: Gooitzen was a seasonal summer hire in 1978 and again 1979, coming from his university studies in the Netherlands to work specifically on the VIP in Phil Baltzer's group. He wrote a few games for the VIP hardware, several of which found their way into the VIP Game Manual; one that didn't show up there that he told me about was a Battleship clone that could actually be played against someone else using a parallel port cable connecting two VIPs together; each player would only be able to see their own screen. He was also very interested in the VIP's musical capabilities, and even performed some Bach using the VIP and a flute during the first Philadelphia Computer Music Expo. At the conclusion of his 1979 tenure, he inquired about coming to RCA permanently, and got a job in an unrelated part of the company (and he's still with the Sarnoff Labs' successor, SRI International, today!) Gooitzen did not do any direct work on the Studio line, which is unsurprising if he only came on board in 1978. As such it is unlikely that he is the actual author of Biorhythm for the Studio II, and while he does remember writing Star Wars (and vaguely remembered Concentration Match), he didn't do those for the Studio III - more likely, he suggested, someone else took his games and converted them to that hardware. He does still own a VIP, though he hasn't gotten it out in years! Didn't mention having anything else related to his time working on those machines, but he had a lot of very fond memories of Andy Modla, Phil Baltzer, BJ Call (who he spoke extremely highly of and thought was very funny), and Joe Weisbecker. I've been going through my transcripts from the oral history project for Hagley and have a bunch of names I'd like to reach out to if I can find them, see if we can close some more knowledge gaps.

New episode! It's time for an Imagic show, as the company published its first three games in April 1982: Demon Attack, Star Voyager and Trick Shot. Demon Attack went on to become one of the VCS's best-selling titles, while Trick Shot is the latest in a surprisingly long line of computer pool games; Star Voyager, meanwhile, redefined how a first-person space game could work on the VCS but was overshadowed by Starmaster only a couple short months later. Special thanks to the Video Game History Foundation for scanning the extremely rare first two issues of Logical Gamer (which were used as sources for this video), to Kay Savetz for helping me reach Dennis Koble, and of course, Koble and the late Bob Smith for letting me pick their brains about the games they worked on decades ago. Are any of those online? I haven't seen any, but I'd be happy to loop them in if they're available.