William Volk papers

Collection

Identifier: VOLK

Staff Only

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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

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.

Extent

959.27 Megabytes (uncompressed)

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Abstract

William Volk was the Vice President of Technology at Activision from 1988–1994. As VP of technology, Volk served as technical lead for Activision's efforts to produce CD-ROM and multimedia titles.

Volk led production on the Multimedia Applications Development Environment (MADE) and the FlexImage multimedia compression standard, both of which were used in the development of the 1993 game Return to Zork. Volk produced many of Activision's CD-ROM titles, including The Manhole, Rodney's Funscreen, various Richard Scarry CD-ROM titles for children, and Planetfall: The Search for Floyd, an unpublished sequel to Infocom's game Planetfall. Volk was also involved with high-level production and technology decisions throughout Activision, including evaluating platforms and technology at a transitional moment for video game and computer hardware.

After leaving Activision, Volk joined Lightspan Partnership as their Chief Technologist from 1994–1999. Volk served a similar role overseeing 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. However, 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, see the "Manifest" file uploaded alongside each drive in the digital archive.

Custodial History

These backups were originally stored on an 8mm tape backup loaned to the Video Game History Foundation by Andrew Harrington, who obtained them from William Volk.