Mayhem wrote:Oh wow... HEY WARD!
Anyone who doesn't know who Ward Shrake is... this is the guy responsible for the Cartzilla list, preserving so many Vic20 games in the 90s (some of which I still have NOT seen physical copies of to this day), and basically keeping the Vic20 alive.
I was also the person who took over handling the Vic20 rarity guide at Digital Press, to give you some context there Ward heh... we met a couple of times at CGE in the early 2000s.
Hey back, Mat! Glad to hear from ya!
This is as good a time as any for me to say a public thanks for your mention in Retro Gamer. Adam Trionfo lives in the same U.S. state that I do (that is, in New Mexico -- but roughly 200 miles apart), and we sometimes visit one another's homes. When we do, we almost always end up talking about old video game stuff, etc., and this time he brought issue #154 of that cool magazine with him. And he pointed out the mention you did, on page 59. Coolness! Puts a smile on my face to see it!
That said, my sense of fairness tells me that I should mention that Paul LeBrasse from England should get equal credit when it comes to locating and dumping VIC-20 cartridge games in the early 1990s. While I was sort of the public face of that effort, at least in the USA, I never intended to get (or take) sole credit. Paul never seemed to me to be all that gung-ho about getting credit for his VIC-20 cart locating / archiving work, but I personally feel he deserves a lot of it.
From my point of view, the way I see it is that I was just the one "doing most of the (public) talking". But having been there, I can say with assurance that it was always a 50/50 workload split between Paul and I, as far as locating and then "begging" for, and then archiving so many VIC-20 carts, back then. We accomplished a lot, in a short period of time -- partly, in hindsight, because any time I'd email him to say that I had been talking in email with some person who sounds like they would loan me such-and-such cartridge for the VIC-20, he'd get all extra excited about our joint successes. Or the other way around. If I found / borrowed / archived something cool, he would then seemingly work extra hard to hit up his own contacts, over there in England (or elsewhere) -- and he'd find another (sometimes unheard of) cart to archive, too ... and then it would be my turn to "stay caught up" or even to try to get ahead (in a very friendly way) with our two-continent effort to find out what was really out there; and then to find someone who'd loan or sell us anything we didn't have in our collection. We'd share the digital files with one another; play test them; discuss what we thought of our new finds (all in private email, usually) ... and would then share the digital files with others.
Keeping lists of what had and hadn't yet been archived was sort of a "between us" thing, at first -- but made a lot of sense, later on, to share in public. And the more carts we had originally never heard of, ourselves (or knew only as rumors or as a name only) but had eventually scrounged up copies of, via our growing lists of contacts, then, yeah, it made more and more sense to start sharing that list with others. And keeping it updated, with dates / version numbers / whatever.
Something that made our work a lot more possible, back then, was the timing. The I'net hadn't yet developed into what it ended up becoming. It was a hugely great thing, but it wasn't what it is today. This was back in the "paying $10 an hour to connect to the internet, via a telephone line" days -- so it took a substantial commitment for an average person, to want to be racking up $200-a-month in connection fees, some months! (Before making it a habit to jump on the net; transmit a pre-typed-up message or whatever; and log back off!) So, while pockets existed of people that thought VIC-20 stuff was cool and worth finding, they weren't connected with one another like they are today. Which helped to keep popularity low, of the carts we were trying to find -- which made it more possible to actually lay our hands on things, and thus dump 'em.
Too much further, in time, and neither Paul nor I could have afforded to pay "collector prices" for VIC-20 carts! Too far back, and the global communication network wouldn't have been developed enough to make the many contacts we made.
And to be honest, timing probably helped in a lot of other little subtle ways. When Paul and I were doing our archiving work, a lot of people were FAR more into things like Atari 2600 carts. A huge part of the success of my part of our joint effort to archive VIC-20 carts, back in the early 1990s, was that I was finding HUGE stashes of things like super-rare VCS carts, or accessories, or whatever, and was totally willing to part with them ... in exchange for VIC carts I didn't have.
Some of the "crazy" trades I was making, would probably give Atari 2600 guys heart attacks, these days -- but that's ok!
My memory of things was that Paul and I, on some level, seemed to know that we were in a weird pocket of time where it was just a matter of time until some of the stuff we were archiving, would have ended up in a landfill forever, if we had not (for instance) been making absolutely "crazy" deals for carts that (almost) no one wanted, back then ... and had trade bait that was, by some standards, just too frakkin' juicy to pass up. My point is that sacrifices continually got made! But I didn't see it that way, then; and still don't, now. It was fun! Finding some super-ridiculously-rare Atari 2600 cart, and then handing it off (in some cases) for 10% of what collectors then thought it was worth, was totally worth it if it knocked two or three (or even one) really cool rarity off of the list of carts we knew existed, or suspected probably existed.
And as implied or mentioned: one of us finding some major score, was cool in itself ... whether it "counted" for what we wanted, or not. Telling Paul, in email, that some odd store near a specific thrift store in say, Pomona, California, that was sort of in a "risking your life to be there" sort of neighborhood (or some some people told me, anyway, but I never really felt it was that bad; having grown up in similar neighborhoods) had yielded up a batch of 2600 carts that were ones that sometimes made the 2600 guys gasp, and that the carts were still essentially new-in-box, was encouraging in itself! It not only meant we were finding great trade bait for attracting VIC-20 carts, but it showed us a lot was "out there" and waiting to be found! And that the Big-Buck Collectors that would put it out of our reach, hadn't yet laid hands on it.
I feel I can't stress enough that some of those in-email type trades I made with diehard 2600 guys, or guys who primarily collected for other "popular" systems at that time, must have been a HUGE "get us noticed" sorta thing, amongst those types of collectors who were doing the opposite of what we were doing: that is, collecting low-value trade bait, just due to it "being there". Stuff like VIC carts were, to some of these guys, worth picking up just to pick them up; even if they did not "really" collect for the Commodore computer systems. But on finding out what we'd trade them, and had available for purposes like that, I think some of these guys probably rescued some finds from thrift stores / charity shops / garage or sidewalk or boot sales, that would have normally ended up in a landfill. And I'm not regretful about the "crazy" trades I had made! If I found, for instance, something crazy-rare and new-in-box for a few dollars (say, a super-rare Atari VCS Starpath Supercharger tape game, like Frogger or whatever) and ultimately used it as trade bait to get money and/or VIC carts, but some random collector(s) out there figured it was worth $300 or $400 dollars, it was still totally worth it to me, to unload it to some super-grateful guy who'd pay me, say, $30 or $40 who knew he'd never find that game in the wild and/or afford to be able to pay for it. I can't prove it, but doing deals like that HAD to have put me on a lot of other collector's "good trader" lists -- and sometimes that might pay off, later, when they heard of someone having Cart XYZ for the VIC -- which maybe they would tell me about, or tell Paul about ... and our "good karma" would pay off, down the road, with more VIC loot.
Speaking of which: Paul ended up with most of the super-rare carts I once handled. The "plastic box" as I thought of it, wasn't my goal. I was working on a "catch and release" basis, which helped my overall volume, tremendously. But towards the end of our joint efforts, I was scanning in images of my super-rares ... and Paul talked me out of the actual carts. I was happy he ended up with them, too! That was what made the work he was doing, so satisfying to him, back then. I wanted the digital files more than the carts. He wanted both. And in time, we both got what we had hoped to obtain.
Just to throw something else out there, that not that many people immediately understand about that time period:
Emulation, as we know it today, didn't yet exist -- so the cart finding / archiving work all started with Paul and I both separately assuming that, maybe, six guys somewhere could / would put these archived ROMs to use! The idea, as I saw it at the beginning point of our joint efforts was that this archiving stuff would be cool for a handful of people; but beyond that, it wouldn't really "catch on" all that much. But I didn't see that as a deterrent. And neither did Paul. He had very good memories of his original VIC-20 days, and he wanted original copies (to keep) of as many of the carts as was possible. For myself, I had gotten into Commodores in the early C64 days (but had computer-club friends who still loved their VICs and considered them viable game machines, even when the C64 was "picking up speed" / market share) so I didn't have those sort of nostalgic feelings, as much as I just wondered what else was out there, that was kinda cool and fun to see/play. So Paul was sort of going for "round two" on his original VIC-20 days; whilst I was sort of "in those original VIC-20 days" in a sense. He was re-discovering stuff, and catching up on what he had missed. I was catching up on all of it, all at once. But at no time, early on, when Paul and I were talking in private emails about what we wanted to do, and why, was anything but "real hardware" on my radar screen. The internet, as it existed back then, was just a cool communication / distribution network. And PC's, as I saw them then, were just a way to access that distribution / communication set of capabilities.
It was literally a shock to me, when something like "PC VIC" showed up, somewhere, and Paul let me know it existed. My own PC at the time was a bit behind the times; and I remember Paul telling me that I might need to upgrade to a 486, to be able to actually use this crazy new emulation idea -- and, early on, I basically dismissed it as a crazy fad or a fluke or some bit of weirdness it was safe to ignore. He basically kept bugging me -- in between other work we were both doing -- with the idea that I was missing out, by ignoring that unplanned use for the ROMs we were dumping. And I gave it a try.
I was absolutely floored when I first saw "PC VIC" actually playing some of those cart images, and doing a good job of it. My initial reaction to the idea of a PC emulating a VIC-20, and allowing a person to play the ROM images we were spending so much time tracking down; "begging to borrow" (and/or sometimes begging to buy); and then carefully archiving (which also sometimes necessitating cleaning, first) and then playing (on real Commodore hardware; and then (almost initially as a "why not?" / afterthought) sharing with others via FTP and FUNET and the like ... well, my point is that, early on, I hadn't seen emulation coming. And I don't recall Paul having seen it coming, either. The idea that a PC (back in the "still using a 386, with a mostly-black screen" days) with a 9600 baud external modem could snowball into today's emulation scene, wasn't even remotely on my radar, back when Paul and I had sat down (virtually speaking) and began discussing the idea of essentially starting completely over, as far as archiving the cart images that once were publicly available. (We'd found way too many holes in the "we knew it had to exist" lists; and what was out there, was maybe 1/3 buggy or "bad dumps" -- so after some discussion, we both started with the idea that it would be better to just pretend none of the prior dumps had even existed. We wanted to lay our hands on every cart we could find, and archive them ourselves -- and if it turned out that all we did was to confirm that the prior dumps were good, that was fine. Same deal as we continued on -- if we had a chance to re-re-dump something, the confirmation couldn't hurt. In so doing, we ended up discovering that some carts had been released in, say, both 8k and 12k forms -- or whatever -- which made the work of "confirming" stuff well worth it.)
Anyway ... I didn't mean to type all that much! Just originally wanted to give Paul LeBrasse his due, on archiving work!!