To me it will always be spelled "Brøderbund"... if only because of all the time I spent as a kid staring at loading screens with that slashed-o name on them :-D
Glad to see this stuff getting preserved for posterity.
The actual list of content is incredibly disappointing. I wouldn't quite call this a non-event, but the material in this collection is less impressive than the announcement made me think at first.
What I see listed in the PDF generally falls into a few categories:
1. HR crap. Office plans, employee lists, various internal forms and memos. Of very little interest to anyone, unless there's something incredibly surprising hidden in there. (Probably not.)
2. Financial data. Interesting if you care about the finances of a software company from the 80s, incredibly boring otherwise.
3. Publicity documents. Product booklets, posters, newsletters, etc. These were given out all over the place, so it's not like these are things that have never been seen before.
4. A few folders of design papers. This is the potentially interesting part, but there's not a lot of them and they aren't described in any detail. Hopefully these are good.
5. Some very old disks which may or may not still be readable. This part just makes me kind of angry. These are almost certainly 5.25" disks, and as such they are nearing the end of their lifetime. If they haven't been stored well, they're likely already toast. Someone needs to get into this archive and copy these to more durable media NOW.
It's a non-event to you because you want design docs, not 'incredibly boring' financial data or 'HR crap'. The reality is that this type of archive isn't really meant for you, it's meant for historians and other researchers. The contents listed here are pretty standard for a corporate archive.
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).
> Someone needs to get into this archive and copy these to more durable media NOW.
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.
That's why Piracy has actually some very positive effects in terms of keeping working copies ALIVE many years after the software/companies/machines are gone and dead. Look at the Amiga ADF archive (most of it is made of illegal copies), most of it would have been lost if no one did crack the games in the first place.
In a lot of cases the source code did not really exist in a meaningful way - lots of people on 8-bits wrote source code in a machine code monitor, with no comments or labels of any kind - rather than in a macro-assembler.
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).
Well ID does not really do it, you should rather say Carmack. Now he's gone and we don't know if ID will continue to release source code in the future. Besides, I was referring to older games, in my book anything from Doom and onwards is relatively "recent" in the history of videogames.
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.
Glad to see this stuff getting preserved for posterity.