William Volk papers
Scope and Contents
This collection includes two hard drive backups from William Volk, created in October 1994. These drives include a large amount of documents, correspondence, reports, and source code from Volk's work at Activision, as well as some documentation from his first months at Lightspan Partnership.
Access to the following types of files has been restricted:
- Source code for video games and development tools
- Development builds of commercial games
- Copyrighted music files
- Personal documents unrelated to Volk's career
- Personal information related to other Activision employees, such as personnel reviews
Volk's backups also contained Macintosh games, development tools, and other commercial software. These have been omitted from the publicly accessible versions of these drives in our digital archive. Some Macromedia Director files and executables have been presented in the digital archive as video files.
Personally identifiable information (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.) has been redacted form the library's publicly accessible copies of these files.
Dates
- Creation: Majority of material found within 1988–1994
- Existence: backup created October 26, 1994
Creator
- William Volk (Producer, Person)
Conditions Governing Access
The Video Game History Foundation has been given permission by William Volk to reproduce material in this collection. The intellectual property rights for these materials remains with their respective owners.
Access to sensitive materials and proprietary code has been restricted by the Video Game History Foundation (see the "Scope and Contents" note for this collection). Closed access to these materials may be provided to individual researchers on request at the discretion of the Video Game History Foundation library staff.
Conditions Governing Use
To the extent that he owns the rights to the materials in this collection, William Volk has allowed these materials to be reproduced for research and educational purposes (including both print and digital publication) with attribution to William Volk and the Video Game History Foundation. The intellectual property rights for these materials remains with their respective owners.
Full Extent
959.27 Megabytes (uncompressed)
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
William Volk was the Vice President of Technology at Activision from 1988–1994. As VP of technology, Volk was involved with high-level production and technology decisions throughout Activision at a transitional moment for video game and computer hardware. He served as technical lead for Activision's efforts to produce multimedia titles and oversaw the company's adoption of new platforms including multimedia-compatible computers, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, 3DO, and CD-i.
Volk was also involved in the production of specific titles and technology under Activision. He was the producer and technical director for the 1993 game Return to Zork, for which he led development on the Multimedia Applications Development Environment (MADE) and the Flex (or FlexImage) multimedia compression standard. He served similar roles on other CD-ROM titles, including The Manhole, Rodney's Funscreen, and Planetfall: The Search for Floyd, an unpublished sequel to Infocom's game Planetfall.
After leaving Activision, Volk joined Lightspan Partnership as their Chief Technologist from 1994–1999, where he oversaw technical implementation of Lightspan's educational software titles.
Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements
William Volk's backup tape was digitized by volunteer Keith Kaisershot. Volk used a Macintosh computer, and the data was digitized was two HFS+ disk images. The original disk images have been retained for archival storage.
We have attempted to present as many files as possible in a modern format in order to be viewed in-browser. This resulted in some formatting changes from the original documents.
Several documents in Volk's papers were intended to be printed and contain dynamic dates, ie., they will always show today's date rather than the date they were written. These documents have not been unaltered and will display the current date when viewed in our digital archive.
Many files could not be identified or converted due to their obsolete and proprietary formats. In particular, this affects files related to the MADE and FLEX multimedia development formats. Unparsable files have either been omitted or marked as unreadable. Several files could not be easily extracted and converted due to using the classic Mac OS-specific resource fork format.
For a complete list of all files originally on each hard drive and their original dates, see the "Manifest" file uploaded alongside each drive in the digital archive.
Custodial History
These backups were originally stored on a DDS data tape loaned to the Video Game History Foundation by Andrew Harrington, who obtained them from William Volk.
Appraisal
William Volk's hard drive backups contained a substantial amount of personal files unrelated to his work at Activision or Lightspan Partnership. Documents related to Volk's finances and family were removed from our public upload of this collection. However, documents related to Volk's hobby as a cyclist were retained; although not related to his career, these files provide additional context for Volk's life and interests during this period.
Physical Description
Data was recovered successfully from the tape with no errors.
Subject
- Activision (Production company, Organization)
- Lightspan, Inc (Production company, Organization)
- Infocom (Production company, Organization)
- Cyan, Inc (Production company, Organization)
- Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (Production company, Organization)
Source
- Andrew Harrington (Donor, Person)
- William Volk (Donor, Person)
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the Video Game History Foundation Library Repository