Help me with some document sleuthing!

[irvinetom]

Hello all! As some of you know, Braxton Soderman and I (Tom Boellstorff) are hard at work on our book about Intellivision (and having a wonderful time with it). I've recently run into a wall looking for a document and wanted to see if any of you could leverage your superpower sleuthing skills on our behalf. 

 

In February, 1982 a report “The Video Game Industry” was issued by an analyst at Goldman Sachs named Richard Simon. References to this report appear in places like PlayThings magazine, and also three times in the New York times in 1982-83:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/17/business/video-games-industry-comes-down-to-earth.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/24/business/what-s-new-in-video-games-taking-the-zing-out-of-the-arcade-boom.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/19/business/the-game-turns-serious-at-atari.html

 

But I cannot find this report anywhere online. Folks at the Strong Institute of Play have tried as well with no success. I have contacted Goldman Sachs but they are so secretive they will not even confirm if they still have a copy or not. I'm going to keep trying to find someone at Goldman who would be willing to help track down this 37-year-old report that can't possibly be of use to them now lol. 

 

But given that the report was quoted in PlayThings, the New York Times, etc., some copies of it must have been distributed to some folks in the industry. It might be lost forever, which would be a shame, but I'm going to keep trying on my part. But if anyone out there can find a copy of this, we'll be more than happy to thank you in the acknowledgments to our book (if you would like that, screen name or regular name lol). It would be so cool to find out what Simon's analysis of the whole situation was at the time!

 

I'll watch for replies in this space, or you could email me at tboellst@uci.edu if you find any leads!