Activision Patches.. Beamriders and ? look

[riffraff]

 

Out with the crappy old pencam.. in with the Nikon D70s! Here's the mysterious Beamrider patch!

Edited March 13, 2007 by riffraff

[Zwackery]

 

My camera is really, really bad. I'll post a better pic if I can find/hook up my scanner.

Absolutely smashing!

 

You have a real rare gem with the rumored alternate/original version of the Beamriders patch:

 

http://www.digitpress.com/archives/cc_patches_rumor.htm

 

Quite a find!

[riffraff]

What about the rectangular Dreadnaught Destroyer? I hadn't seen this anywhere either.

 

Also, I can't get a better picture for a few days. The scanner I had is SCSI and none of my computers have SCSI or can't recognize it.

It's not really possible to see the excellent colors in these from the bad photos.

Edited March 8, 2007 by riffraff

[Rom Hunter]

Very nice.

 

How did you get them?

 

[riffraff]

Ok I've since learned that the Dreadnaught Destroyer patch shown is not that rare and that the Digital Press page is showing the rare variant on their site as a mistake (the triangular one). The Beamrider one is another story.

 

Ok, on to where these patches came from:

 

In the summer of 1989 I was working on my first published game for Activision called Beyond Dark Castle for the C-64 which was a port from a black & white Mac game of the same name. For the last week of the project they asked me to come work at the office in California and I did. While there I noticed this fairly large box full of Activision patches. Inside the box were individual plastic bags with various amounts of patches. I asked the producer of my project if I could take 1 of each patch from the box and he laughed, then said it would be ok. So thats what I did! (way before I had done any serious collecting other than NES carts) I think they stopped shipping out patches very soon after that as it was pretty late in the game for that stuff.

 

Here's some other fun info tho...

 

* One of the other patches I got from the box was the "common" Beamrider's patch and I'm pretty sure they were sending that one out at the time when someone wrote in for one.

 

* The programmer who did the Amiga port of Beyond Dark Castle is Michael Schwartz, a life-long friend of mine and gave me my first pro job doing the c-64 port. If this name sounds vaguely familliar he was the programmer/designer for Chase the Chuckwagon. He also programmed some Xonox games like Artillery Duel and Chuck Norris.

 

* Activision was working on Ghostbusters II for the 2600 and other systems at the time and it was nearly finished. I've been out of it for a while so if any protos have shown up since then I wouldn't be surprised.

 

* There was a "secret room" which somehow I was able to get a peek inside. This room only had 1 door and was packed with programmers reverse-engineering, coding for, and developing art for a new system called the Sega Genesis which was not yet in stores. I remember them using Deluxe Paint to draw some art and had some kind of Football field working on one of the units which looked a lot like Madden.

[Rom Hunter]

Thanks for sharing.

 

If you can post a nice scan of it, please do.

 

[Crazy Climber]

Hey RiffRaff

cool info man I like reading about stuff like that, thanks for sharing.

[riffraff]

new pic up!