[game_preservation] Video game legal archive

[Martin Goldberg]

Henry -

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:12 PM, Henry Lowood <lowood at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Hi Martin,

>

> This is great news.  A few years back, I set up a project here at Stanford

> to see what the district court archives had.


Wow, that must have been expensive.  Curt and I did the same thing to
get to the bottom of the whole Atari Inc./Atari Corp./Amiga/Commodore
mess and that was pretty costly to get everything from the California
federal court records.  They were not very helpful, and it was
basically "Copies are x a page, and we won't tell you how many
documents there are.  You just send however much money you're willing
to put up and we'll copy what that covers."


>We hired a guy to photocopy

> materials for us, and indeed we received some interesting stuff (some of

> which I used in my Pong article),


Is there any way to see a copy of that article?


>but we learned that due to terms of the

> settlement(s), a lot of the material was sealed.


Yes, we had that issue as well with the Amiga thing.  But that's where
alternative sourcing of documents, interviews, and the like come in.

>From that process, we actually managed to track down other material

that no one had any idea existed (such as many of the advanced
research projects going on at Atari Inc. before the sale).  It's stuff
like that which makes this field genuinely exciting for me.


>   If, after scanning, you

> need an archival home for the papers or for the digitized copies, just let

> me know.


Thanks, we'll certainly keep that in mind.  Some of it's for the 3
volume set Curt and I are working on, and the bulk will be for an
online archive we're putting together.  Some will also be going to a
law institute Ralph has an arrangement with.

Just going through and getting a basic feel for the material and
organizing it was a chore in itself while I was at Ralph's.  Some of
the very interesting things to me (which are not to everyone else)
were some of the original drafts of the patent filings of his,
including exploratory documentation on other possibly related patents.
 It was a pretty involved, thorough, and long process - very unlike
the "Well Ralph was just good at filing patents" (i.e. nothing unique,
he just got the paperwork done before anyone else) that Nolan like to
brush it off as.


>Ralph was a huge help on the article, and I feel like I owe him.

>


He's a great guy, and simply amazingly spry for being 87.  He's still
very active in design and his lab is just a mess of stuff he's working
on every day.  That was the other part of the trip, we're working on
bringing a few research/proto ideas of his to market.  Just an honor
to work with him and gain a glimpse in to the many years of vast
insight in research and design that he has.


Marty