Strong Fellowship – Day Final!

I completed it! The remaining issues of Softalk (including the scant few IBM PC Softalk – surprisingly, very little game coverage, as the top-selling software was basically word processors and spreadsheets). Got to check out a couple Telstar products (Pong and Tank). Digitized the 39 Sumerian Game slides (history has been saved!!). And scanned the James Burgeson archive. There was a little time left over to go through some gamer magazines I was curious about – another hour and I would have gone through them all!

Overall, the trip has been an amazing success. I went through hundreds of magazines, archival documents, and other miscellany with over 10,000 images collected in 3 weeks (13 working days!). Here’s a quick recap:

• Play Meter (coin-op industry trade magazine)
• RePlay (ditto)
• Playthings (toy industry trade magazine)
• Softalk (Apple II user magazine)
• Ralph Baer papers
• Don Daglow papers
• Don Carlson papers (there sure are a lot of game developers named ‘Don’)
• Jerry Lawson papers
• James Burgeson papers
• 1970s and early ’80s news clippings
• Sumerian Game slides
• Gamer magazines (various)
• Played some electronic handhelds and TV games
• Played Computer Space (two-player!)

Wow! Note the Burgeson papers, Sumerian Game slides, Computer Space, and gamer magazines were basically icing on the top, as they weren’t 100% relevant to my research on the crash. I had to be extremely efficient in order to get everything done – sure am glad JP Dyson told me about all that in week 1!

I will be in Rochester until about 5 PM tomorrow – plane transfer in Philly means I get back sometime after 11, provided there aren’t any flight problems. It will be good to be back in Orlando. I’ll write a more detailed analysis of the entire trip and what I got out of it, but there’s one thing I can say for sure: this was INCREDIBLY productive, and I can foresee months of solid research analysis and several papers – possibly a book – from the trip. Yahoo!!