Museum acquires ’virtually complete’ source code from Atari’s arcade heyday | Polygon
▻http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/22/5640114/maze-invaders-atari-arcade-source-code-strong-museum-icheg
Acquiring the source code to virtually every coin-op game Atari made when it dominated the early 1980s arcade scene — Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede — would seem to be enough of a coup. Yet for Jeremy Saucier, the most intimate contact with that era comes in the thousands and thousands of pages of paperwork, much of it routine.
Test-market reports. Focus group results. Written intel on what someone at Atari, for example, thought of Williams’ Joust, how that was going to do as a competitor, and what Atari should do in reply.
“You see how this critical company worked at a critical time,” Jeremy Saucier, assistant director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG), told Polygon, “and how they saw the industry.”