In the summer of 2019, I conducted a few days of archival research at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. I wasn’t really sure what I would find, but I was focused on their extensive archive of corporate documents from the Atari corporation: more than 80 boxes of technical documents, memos, agendas, sketches, advertisements, financial statements, and more!
I didn’t know what I was going to find, though I went in keeping my eyes out for interesting details about music and sound. It was a very happy coincidence that one of the best examples of sound and music in their process of game development centered on two Star Wars arcade games they made in the 1980s. I came home with hundreds of archival images, and I put together a talk for the 2020 North American Conference on Video Game Music. That conference was unfortunately forced online by Covid, but it resulted in a YouTube video presentation that I remain very proud of:
At some point after that, my colleague and friend Will Gibbons invited me to contribute a written version to the Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound that he was co-editing. I have very fond memories (fonder than with most projects) of going back through the Strong Museum archival finds, and supplementing them with more sources from around the internet, mostly hosted by enthusiast websites and digital archives. The final result is linked here!