[game_preservation] The History behind Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[Simon Carless]

Interesting post!

I'm a friend of Andy's, and actually queried him privately about the
'private email' angle too. There's actually another precedent for this in
the game space, in the form of Atari's Vax Mail:

http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm

Again, this is fascinating - and the archiver notes: 'I have also removed
personal phone numbers and addresses to protect people's privacy' - but it's
actual public reprinting of private emails, which I am not that comfortable
with. Nonetheless, it provides information not available elsewhere - in
detail that would definitely not be available elsewhere. It can obviously be
one-sided, though.

My 2c is that the trick is probably to give anyone actually slighted in the
report (in this case Michael Bywater) right of reply, if you're going to go
ahead and do something reasonably unauthorized like this.

There's another example I can think of, actually - at Gamasutra, we printed
a contract and then details of a lawsuit between Activision and Spark:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1740/call_of_duty_finest_hour__the_.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1707/call_of_duty_the_lawsuit.php

We have public documents for the second 'lawsuit' article which actually are
a detailed postmortem to Activision from Spark about 'what went wrong'
during the development of Call Of Duty: Finest Hour, but name and shame
particular former CTOs as being incompetent, which is why the game was late,
etc. We ended up decided to just excerpt and not reprint in full because we
felt it got the point across without getting into onesided browbeating and
possible defamation.

So I guess the point there is that there are many points of view, even to
historical documents :)

Regards,
Simon.
[Publisher, Game Developer, Gamasutra.]

PS - I can't help but speculate that the Infocom backups might have come
from here - http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000626.html - but this is a
guess, not a historical document :P

PPS - Also via Jason Scott -
http://www.archive.org/details/SelfPreservationMode - great talk on
preserving demos visually, which probably runs into some similar issues as
games. For those who haven't seen the Mind Candy DVDs, they're well worth
checking out: http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ . I have an audio commentary or
two on Vol. 2, the Amiga one.


On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 3:45 AM, Julia Brasil <julianya at gmail.com> wrote:


> Hi everyone

>

> Usually I'd introduce myself before throwing random links at mailing

> lists, but I am sure this article is much more interesting than anything I

> can come up with.

>

> For those of you who have not heard of it already, Andy Baio's Waxy.org

> has just published the contents of the long since defunct Infocom's shared

> network drive that reveal the developer was working on a sequel to their

> best selling Hitchhiker's game. It is worth reading just for the backstory

> and the opportunity to get an inside look at the inner workings of the

> creators of Zork, Planetfall and others.

>

> And without further interruption, here's the link.<http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/>

>

> On a secondary note, some people are not very happy with having their

> private e-mail conversation posted online or not being contacted by Mr

> Baio's prior to publishing the article. It seems to me the article reflects

> the work of a historian piecing facts together than, as some claim,

> investigative journalism. What is your take on the matter?

>

> Cheers,

>

> Julia Brasil (who is helping out the SIG atm)

>

> _______________________________________________

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> game_preservation at igda.org

> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation

>

>

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