You know those stories where you go “man, when I write out the big long memoir and history, that’s gonna be one fuckin’ funny chapter”? And then you don’t? And then they’re gone? This is one of those, except it’s not going to be gone. I’m putting it here, after reading this excellent analysis of the Playstation logo.  The writer is unsure how to find certain aspects of the history and so he’s sad he can only do a little bit of the work and do massive leaps of logic where he wouldn’t have to if he could talk to the right people, the names of which are gone. That made me sad for him. And it reminded me of a story.

So, this may or may not be that well known, but not only do I fucking hate Sony, I worked for Sony for a year. This was when I was hired as tech support at Psygnosis USA. I loved everything about Psygnosis, past and present, and so I was absolutely delighted to work there, and the only downside was they’d been bought by Sony, and Sony are assholes. In fact, Sony was in the process of wanting to rename Psygnosis, with the distinct logo and brand and all that, to SCEA – “Sony Computer Entertainment of America”. It was like replacing an incredibly unique sculpture with a cinderblock.

One of the side effects was I got to be there just as the Playstation was introduced. I got to see a development console come in, one of the blue ones.  Here’s something I’d forgotten until I just thought of it – when the development kits with the blue playstation went out to the companies, it had 8mb of memory to work with. At some point, Sony decided that the Playstation would not have 8mb of memory – too expensive. So they made it two. So in some cases, various developers were caught flatfooted when the system they were developing on had its total available memory cut to 25%. On that development station, I was able to play a few games before they got squashed, so some games had more parallax backgrounds (Adventures of Lomax, which did not have a lemming for the main character at this time), or additional characters (Dark Stalkers), etc.  I know Psygnosis had to help in the background with some of these companies, to help Sony ensure as many launch titles as well. No, this isn’t the story yet.

Additionally, and this again is probably not too well known, Sony was banking everything on the Playstation – they had to pull back the 8mb RAM to 2 for this reason, as they were losing money on every console (a process that still takes place, if you follow that sort of thing). But what I heard, and this is hearsay, was that if the Playstation had tanked, pulled a 3DO or perhaps a TI-994/a to be exact, it would have SUNK SONY. They’d survive, of course – those monstrous places always do. But they’d be completely wrecked as a force in the world. People would be losing jobs by the boatloads. It would have been a shadow, until outside investment or some other angel force helped them out of the hole. I’m just saying they had a lot riding on the Playstation.

So part of this, I think, explains Sony’s reliance on Sony Europe on how to make the Playstation play to western markets. While Sony would do what it could locally in Japan to bolster this game machine to the populace, the massive audiences of Europe and most specifically North America were the critical battleground to win. I suppose I could launch into some portrayal of which consoles were active and what the lines were, but let’s keep our eyes on the main theme: Sony. Desperate. Lots riding on the Playstation. Willing to Do Anything.

So in this period, when the plans are being drawn to come up with how to market the Playstation, the decision was made: Club Culture. Nightclubs, and dance halls and lounges and whatever the hell else had a blasting beat and dancefloor and tons of bodies was going to be one of the vanguards of the Playstation’s marketing assault.

This helps explain, I hope, Wipeout, the Psygnosis runaway hit. Hey, funny story there. So Sony was in the process of making Psygnosis change its name to SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment of America, remember) and things looked dim; one of the co-founders of Psygnosis had left some time ago, leaving just one. And just when it started to happen, Wipeout became a huge goddamned hit and sold a bunch of copies (and, ostensibly, Playstations), and Psygnosis’ co-founder basically went “Nah, fuck you, we’re sticking with Psygnosis”, and so the name stuck for another half-decade before he left and Sony finally named it to “SCEA”, as planned. Oh, but that gets even weirder, because for a while, the European branch of SCEA became known as “SCEA Europe”. Oh, you heard right – SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT OF AMERICA OF EUROPE.

Wipeout was a massive hit, one of Psygnosis’ biggest, up there with Lemmings, which is what put Psygnosis (and DMA, later Rockstar) on the map. It was, after all, the thing that made you buy a Playstation. But wait! You probably never knew this, but Psygnosis ported and came out with versions of Wipeout for the Sega Saturn and for PC. Hold up for a moment, and consider that. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony, given development money to make a first-class launch title for their new console, then goes ahead and ports it to all of that console’s rivals. Can you fucking IMAGINE what the sound must have been when the Sony people found out? Oh man, it must have been dazzling.

No! I’m still not at the story quite yet!

So, if you take a look at Wipeout, you can see how this whole “Club Culture” idea was being spread through it. For the soundtrack, Sony pulled out all the stops and got all sorts of hot groups like Prodigy, Future Sound of London and Chemical Brothers to be what was blasting on your speakers and your hot flatscreen TV. The game showed up in the Hackers movie, although in that case they used the SGI-developed prototype/animation system instead of the not-as-nice Playstation version. You were in the future, but the soundtrack was perfect contemporary club hits.  Too bad they only had licensed them for Europe – when Wipeout came over to the US, they had to mostly make new soundtrack cuts, which fell to a wonderful musician named Tim Wright, who under the pseudonym Cold Storage wrote all manner of club-ish hits that slipped right in among chart-topping hits. Not bad, Tim.

I know, lots of things are on my plate and all of us are very busy with whatever has the emotive grip of the world on any moment on twitter, but I suddenly had this weird realization.

Who designed Mr. Do!?

This is what Mr. Do! looks like:

Depending on how rich or poor you think of early 1980s video games, Mr. Do! is either a straight-on Dig Dug ripoff, or a brilliant reworking of some of Dig Dug’s concepts into a basically unique transformative work. It certainly had all sorts of features that its Atari/Namco-designed counterpart did not, and there was absolutely unique artistry in Mr. Do! that was a sufficient character enough to make multiple sequels (Mr. Do!’s Wild Ride, Mr. Do!’s Castle, Do! Run Run, and so on) and each of those were almost brand-new games on their own, so I hope the value of Mr. Do! isn’t called into question.

Now, make no mistake – there is plenty of information about Mr. Do! out there. Here’s some excellent entries on the game itself, maintained by a wide range of folks: The Killer List of Videogames, Exotica, and so on. There’s no question that the concept of Mr. Do and even all sorts of technical knowledge about the game has been preserved.

But seriously. We have no stories of how the game came about, no information about who came up with the concept and why, what made them choose the design elements they did… we don’t know how many people worked on this game, how the team was structured, whether Taito/Universal had a single person slaving away on this project or a pile of folks. We are utterly in the dark.

And don’t think I’m really talking about only Mr. Do! here – it’s not just what this game’s history consists of and whether it has any meaning to you or me specifically. It’s that there’s a whole raft of knowledge and history that we are going to lose about videogames, and that seems a real shame. Who were the guys behind the quick-and-dirty Crazy Kong bootleg? What about Venture by Exidy? There are so many examples of this stuff falling between the cracks.

This is why I got into the whole documentary gig in the first place – tracking down folks who unknowingly (or knowingly) influenced a lot of people but had no spotlight or recording of their side of the story around. It took a hell of a lot of time to find the ANSI artist Ebony Eyes, for example, or to make all the arrangements to interview John Madill, who was FidoNet node #2. I would have hoped that at this point, even with places like Atari hiding who did what for various videogames, to know, ultimately, who these people were. I am very afraid we have not done a good job tracking them down, and we’re going to lose this knowledge forever.

Update: So, after some luck and research, I’ve found the name of the designer: Kazutoshi Ueda. But that’s about it – I don’t have photos, interviews, writings, history, or anything else. I am sure some of this is a language gap, but still – it’s a real shame so little about him has trickled out into the world, and my point stands.

Obviously other things are starting to come to the forefront with regards to saving digital history, but starting projects and not seeing them to fruition/completion is no way to go about life, even if it’s a business plan for some people.

So, the Geocities Torrent, a 900gb monster compressed to 643gb and spread via the usual channels for such things, turned out to have a slight flaw – it was fucking huge. And for UNIX filesystems only – run it on Windows are you are a sad little torrenting panda. Yet another flaw was that I only occasionally create new torrents, and I almost never create torrents that are any size, and a whole lot of buffoonery occurred, meaning we are now where a handful of folks are sitting at 99.95% downloaded and have been sitting there for a while.

This is all my fault. There was a lot of data, with a lot of time involved, and I should have immediately made a copy of the resulting archives and shipped drives to various locations. That’s what I’d do now. I’d also have made the filenames non-case-sensitive. So yeah, bad on me.

What I will stand with pride on, however, is the whole idea of the torrent in the first place. Released one year after the closure of Geocities, the actual idea of Geocities had already faded to nothing. With the announcement of the torrent, the lights came back on and a lot of press was generated about the loss of Geocities, the cavalier way Yahoo! had treated all this user data. The debate of data retention and web history was rekindled in a big way.

But, until now, it was pretty nigh impossible to get 100% of the torrent.

So, one of the most inspiring use of the available-but-slightly-damaged material was One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, an actual archeological study of the material in the Geocities morass we’d dumped on the world. Run by two professor-artists, Olia and Dragan, the weblog would push out greater and greater forays into the stories behind the works. In some cases, they found the actual people who had made the animated GIFs or who had created the pages, and talked to them. In some cases, they were too late, and the interviews became obituaries. It is VERY worth your time to check them out.

Like others, the happy pair started to become more and more cranky as the torrent failed to complete, as did people who wandered into the Archiveteam IRC channel. Let’s just say I was a tad undiplomatic. But, over time, we traced the problem to a handful of files that had gotten corrupted on the original sets of archives. I must point out: the original data downloaded was never corrupted, just the archives generated from them that were then used to generate the torrent. And, unfortunately, it is not entirely easy to generate drop-in replacements for files in the torrent. The solution became one of generating brand new archives for the corrupted files, and making a “patch” of sorts. And that’s what happened, although it took a good long time because THIS IS A LOT OF GEOCITIES.

As I am now retired from the over-5gb torrent business, Dragan and Olia went ahead, tested the archive, verified it all worked, and have made a new torrent.

HERE IS THE NEW TORRENT. YOU WANT THIS ONE.

If you have been downloading the original torrent, do not despair. The files WILL match up – just go from one to the other, and it will add in what you’ve finished into this new torrent.

Again, the resulting files are not for everyone – they’re definitely not what you want if you just wanted to browse some old Geocities sites for nostalgia – the live sites Reocities and Geocities.WS do that job for you nicely. This is a collection for historians, for researchers, for developers. For those who want to do study on the heritage on something so soon gone and yet so much of part of how we got here.

Enjoy.