Broderbund founder donates company archives to National Museum of Play

If someone wants to write a book about how 1980s game companies worked 50 years from now, then all that boring financial data and HR crap becomes much more relevant than the design documents (as interesting as they may be).

I do agree with you about the disks, though.

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.

And even when they did, the source often stayed with the author rather than with the distributor, and may only have been "archived" on a single floppy in their personal collections, which may have stopped working, ended up in an attic or gotten thrown away.

Keep in mind that many of the early games were "throwaway" projects of a few weeks or months of freelance work for the people involved, and often conversions from other platforms where the lack of importance ascribed to source was demonstrated in that many conversions were done without access to source code or even design documents. E.g. some arcade conversions were done by playing the arcade game a lot to figure out the graphics and level designs and overall musical style....

For a lot of these games, your best bet is to crack out a disassembler and reverse engineer them. On the upside, most of the ancient games are tiny and fairly easy to figure out. E.g. for C64 games, use a freezer cartridge, and check the address stored in $EA31 and $EA32. It contains the address of the raster-interrupt. Almost everything in most C64 games hangs off the raster interrupt. That + 6502 assembly + a book explaining the C64 registers is all you need to get a good start at reverse engineering the workings of 90%+ of C64 games, and most of them will consists of at most a few thousand lines of code (The rest includes various oddities - e.g. Sid Meier's Pirates for C64 consisted of high level logic written in BASIC plus a bunch of asm subroutines to speed things up and/or save space).

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."