Preview of the William Volk papers

For our backer blog patrons: an early look at the William Volk papers, a new collection coming to the VGHF Digital Library. Historians are going to have a field day with this one...

William Volk was the vice president of technology at Activision from 1988–1994. He was in charge of Activision's tech at a pivotal time for the company. For one thing, they were recovering from bankruptcy. But also, he was responsible for evaluating new tech at a time when there was a LOT of new tech. There were new consoles on the way. CD-ROMs and multimedia were just on the horizon. And Volk had to figure out which—if any!—of these new platforms and technologies they were committing their development resources to.

Volk kept a backup of his hard drive from his time at Activision, which overlaps a little bit with his later work at educational game developer Lightspan Partnership. He had thousands of digital files, everything from development timelines and memos to backed-up Compuserve message board threads.

While we were processing this collection, we kept notes about some of the most interesting things we found. Before we open any of it up, we figured we'd give you an early taste!

(This is adapted from a video script that we're recording soon.)

A cautious approach to publishing

One thing we noticed is that while Activision was recovering from their bankruptcy, they were pretty conservative with what games they published and what they were willing to take risks on.

One of the documents we have from Volk is a development timeline for Activision's projects circa 1993, which included Radical Rex for SNES/Genesis, originally under the name Baby T-Rex. It looks like the game's production he hit a snag early on when the Activision sales team raised concerns about how well a game called Baby T-Rex was actually going to sell. They ended up meeting with developer Beam Software to get some reassurances about the title, and then shortly after, they held a focus group and came up with a new title. At this time, Activision was being very cautious about what projects they were willing to commit their resources to.

There's also an example (not sharing it just yet!) of a game that was canceled because Activision wanted to attach a license to it. Game history researchers already knew this game had been canceled close to release, but now we know why! It was a precarious time for Activision, and at this point, they weren't going with anything that didn't have strong sales and marketing potential right out of the gate.

Conference write-ups

As the head of technology, Volk often went out to conferences to learn about new products and tech were in development. Volk kept a lot of his write-ups from these events that he shared with the rest of the company, as well as a couple he got from other Activision staff.

These reports from events like the Consumer Electronics Show reported on things like early impressions for then-upcoming 3DO console, which Volk noted programmers were excited about, but producers were more cautious of given some of the bottlenecks on the system's hardware and video compression.

Volk also saved a write-up of the 1993 Computer Game Developer Conference from another Activision employee, which not only had summaries of panels and roundtables, but also summaries of the meetings they took with game industry executives!

New hardware, new problems

As part of his job evaluating new hardware, William Volk would also meet with the developers of upcoming platforms and report back on what they were working on.

Volk got early glimpses of a whole lot of different technology. In his papers, you can read memos with his early impressions about the Sega Genesis (which at the time was being referred to as just "Mega"). Or the Super Famicom, which he liked more than the Genesis! Or the PlayStation, which was being abbreviated internally as PS-X at that time.

We also have some evidence that shows that Activision was talking with Nintendo about their then-upcoming CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo in development with Philips. Volk had some detailed technical questions about how its CPU and RAM worked.

Info about unreleased games

Activision had many titles in production in the early 90s, and quite a few of them never came out. From the production schedules and documents that Volk kept on his hard drive, we can learn a lot about what some of these games were and what happened to them.

We'll share more details once the collection launches, but among the titles we have information about:

• Parallel Worlds, a multimedia choose-your-own-adventure game.

• Planetfall: The Search for Floyd, aka Return to Planetfall, an unrealized third game in Infocom's Planetfall series.

• River Raid: The Mission of No Return and Kaboom!: The Mad Doctor’s Revenge, two reboots of classic Activision properties that were quietly canceled in 1993.

• Something called Dracula vs. Frankenstein that was canceled almost immediately due to rights issues.

Ken Williams: Going Ape Spit

Activision wasn't the only company dealing with a big change in platforms and technology. Over at Sierra On-Line, they were also having concerns about which platforms they should be developing for. By 1989, the Apple II computer, previously one of the big platforms for Sierra, was on its way out, and the new Apple platforms, the IIGS and Macintosh, hadn't proven themselves as gaming platforms at the same level yet.

So in October 1989, Ken Williams, the president and CEO of Sierra, wrote a hostile letter to Apple CEO John Sculley, in which he threatened to pull support for Apple hardware unless Apple subsidized their development costs and committed their own marketing resources to promote Sierra games. Of course, this didn't happen, and Sierra abandoned Apple II and IIGS support by the end of the year.

So… why did William Volk have a copy of this letter? Our best guess is that computer game publishers talked with each other about their relationships with platform owners, like mean girls at the lunch table. So even though they were competitors, Activision was still clued in about the challenges Sierra was facing.

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There's a LOT of good stuff in the William Volk papers. This is the kind of collection we love opening up. It's not flashy and doesn't have big eye-catching artwork, but this is type of material is incredibly valuable to historians who want a first-hand understanding of how the game industry was operating.

The current plan is to open this collection by the end of the month, assuming we can get the video together quickly enough!