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William Volk papers are open!
🕑 Added 2025-09-30 14:30:11 +0000 UTCHi folks! Today we're opening up research access to the William Volk papers, a collection of documents from former Activision VP of technology William Volk.
Backer Blog members have been hearing about the William Volk papers for a while now, but if you're one of our free followers, now's the time to learn about him! We did a full write-up on our website, which you should definitely read, but we'll copy the highlights here.
Volk led the technology team at Activision from 1988–1994. It was a precarious time for the company, and at the same time, there was a big generational change in the game industry. Volk was in charge of evaluating new technology, producing key titles, and, in general, managing any sort of tech-related questions or challenges at Activision.
This collection is rich with historical information that historians will love. Like...
Write-ups of conferences, like the Consumer Electronics Show, or something called the Conference on CD-ROM and Multimedia.
Early impressions and specs of then-new systems, like the Super Famicom and Sega Genesis.
Weekly development timelines for titles in production throughout Activision, with new information unreleased games like River Raid: Mission of No Return, Return to Planetfall, and Death Track for Game Boy.
Reams of material related to the development of the engine and video compression tech used in Return to Zork.
So many other documents you will love if you're researching the early 90s game industry.
(from "Dev. Offsite 2_25")We can't wait to see what else people find in here! Again, see the blog post for detailed information about how we recovered these files, and check out the video for a whole bunch of examples of the kind of information you can find in here.
