Origin Systems Treasures Unearthed

[GameBanshee News]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is pointing to an article on The Artful Gamer about a recent project that was undertaken by fans and Mythic Entertainment employees to archive "several crateloads" of old Origin Systems data and documents.

I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know some details on the trip to EA’s Origin archive at Mythic Entertainment. We spent a week going thru the last of Origin’s old holdings, and have sucessfully archived an enormous amount of data, including:

CD Images: 708
SyQuest Images: 25
Photographs: 3,390
3.5″ Disks: 274
Optical Discs: 2
DAT Tapes: 36
8mm Tape Images: 8
Scans: 8,225
VHS Tapes: 101

The trip was a total success, with the recovery/documentation of some truly rare artifacts. The guys running Mythic were incredibly supportive and they treated us all like true professionals. We all got to live our childhood game developer fantasies and work with Origin data for twelve hours a day for a week — it was an incredible experience.

There was a total of just under 1 Terabyte of data that we recovered, in the form of ISO files and photographs. Technically, we don’t know specifically what we have yet, but I’ve seen box layouts, advertising proofs, video interviews, original artwork pieces, award trophies, design documents, budgets for live action film shoots… absolutely fascinating material for anyone interested in how these games were made.

Some highlights of what was recovered:
* Artwork from the unreleased Privateer 3
* Possible data from several unreleased games (Bioforge Plus, Technosaur, Ultima IX source code–Lost Vale was not specifically listed on any data labels, but there was a tape called U8-project archive)
* Detailed photographs of the *head* of Prince Thrakath (Wing Commander 3)
* Over 20 design docs for various Wing Commander, UO and UO2 projects
* videos of interviews w/Mark Hammil, Richard Garriott, Star Long, and others

There will be more discoveries made, as we catalogue all of the data.

The “official” word from Mythic’s office manager is that we need to vett everything before handing out data… but then their producer who arranged all his, Paul Barnett, has said he wants to see it preserved and available for people quickly–perhaps this may get to users hands!.

There's also a link to some pictures of the process, with these three pictures standing out amongst the rest. It would be great if some of this content ends up at the Origin Museum so we can check it out.