
Broderbund founder donates company archives to National Museum of Play - evo_9
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/03/04/broderbund-founder-donates-company-archives-to-national-museum-o/
======
smacktoward
To me it will always be spelled "Brøderbund"... if only because of all the
time I spent as a kid staring at loading screens with that slashed-o name on
them :-D

Glad to see this stuff getting preserved for posterity.

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kbrosnan
Why not link the press release directly? The content is quite a bit better.

[http://www.thestrong.org/press/releases/2014/03/4721-br-
derb...](http://www.thestrong.org/press/releases/2014/03/4721-br-derbund-
software-inc-founder-donates-games-business-archives)

Where I found a link to a brief summary of each item donated
[http://www.libraryandarchivesofplay.org/sites/www.libraryand...](http://www.libraryandarchivesofplay.org/sites/www.libraryandarchivesofplay.org/files/uploads/Finding%20Aid%20to%20the%20Broderbund%20Software%20Inc.%20collection_022714.pdf)

~~~
duskwuff
The actual list of content is incredibly disappointing. I wouldn't quite call
this a non-event, but the material in this collection is less impressive than
the announcement made me think at first.

What I see listed in the PDF generally falls into a few categories:

1\. HR crap. Office plans, employee lists, various internal forms and memos.
Of very little interest to anyone, unless there's something incredibly
surprising hidden in there. (Probably not.)

2\. Financial data. Interesting if you care about the finances of a software
company from the 80s, incredibly boring otherwise.

3\. Publicity documents. Product booklets, posters, newsletters, etc. These
were given out all over the place, so it's not like these are things that have
never been seen before.

4\. A few folders of design papers. This is the potentially interesting part,
but there's not a lot of them and they aren't described in any detail.
Hopefully these are good.

5\. Some very old disks which may or may not still be readable. This part just
makes me kind of angry. These are almost certainly 5.25" disks, and as such
they are nearing the end of their lifetime. If they haven't been stored well,
they're likely already toast. Someone needs to get into this archive and copy
these to more durable media _NOW_.

~~~
yardie
> Someone needs to get into this archive and copy these to more durable media
> NOW.

This is a problem archivist are having right now with data from even 10 years
ago. 100 year old books and nitrite films just need a stable, cool, dry
environment. Have you seen the hoops people jump through to get an old Apple
floppy read? It's a race to copy the data to the current storage format before
the last machine stops working.

~~~
ekianjo
That's why Piracy has actually some very positive effects in terms of keeping
working copies ALIVE many years after the software/companies/machines are gone
and dead. Look at the Amiga ADF archive (most of it is made of illegal
copies), most of it would have been lost if no one did crack the games in the
first place.

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dan-g
Does this mean that they might release the source code for their games?

The world needs a port of Zoombinis.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah, source code release for ancient games would be nice, to say the least. I
don't understand why NOBODY does it. (apart from Mechner)

~~~
ars
Doesn't ID software do that too?

~~~
ekianjo
Well ID does not really do it, you should rather say Carmack. Now he's gone
and we don't know if ID will continue to release source code in the future.
Besides, I was referring to _older games_ , in my book anything from Doom and
onwards is relatively "recent" in the history of videogames.

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Pxtl
Oh man, I'm nostalgia-ing so hard for Lode Runner on the C64 right now.

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nathos
Additional coverage at Polygon:
[http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/3/5467718/broderbund-museum-
of...](http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/3/5467718/broderbund-museum-of-play-
collection-myst-prince-of-persia-carmen-sandiego)

They did a nice feature on ICHEG (the International Center for the History of
Electronic Games) at The Strong last year:
[http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/6/25/4452894/the-
strong...](http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/6/25/4452894/the-strong-
preserving-the-history-of-video-games)

And of course, a direct link to ICHEG:
[http://www.icheg.org](http://www.icheg.org)

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spiritplumber
STUNTS.EXE

~~~
cpach
I played Stunts II (PC) a lot when I was a kid. It was more fun than any other
racing game I've encountered since :)

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threeseed
Their really needs to be a Shufflepuck Cafe for iOS:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVtYVyyX5NY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVtYVyyX5NY)

~~~
ac29
Similar: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shufflepuck-
cantina/id553470...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shufflepuck-
cantina/id553470733?mt=8)

Available on Android/OSX/Windows/Linux also.

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rurounijones
Yesss! I basically grew up on the Carmen Sandiago games. Time to introduce
them to a new generation.

~~~
Frqy3
Raid on Bungeling Bay on the C64 was the one for me. So many hours ...

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Here's one of my favorite game-design stories.

Raid on Bungeling Bay was, of course, a free-roaming top-down game where you
fly a helicopter over a vast archipelago, dogfighting enemy planes and bombing
factories. Every island was individually laid out, with a coastline,
buildings, road network, even a couple of airfields where the enemy planes
spawned and refueled. The designer built a layout tool to streamline setting
up those islands, and at some point he realized he was having more fun
building attractive layouts than actually playing the game. He thought maybe
others might feel the same, so when RoBB was complete, his next game was
essentially a gamified version of that layout tool, with more interactions and
an economy and so forth.

He called it "SimCity."

