Guys, I found out today Empire Interactive has gone into administration a few weeks back. What this means is I am now more comfortable sharing details about a huge find I had last September when they moved from the site they had been in since the late 80's in North Finchley, London, to Muswell Hill. To cut a long story short, they left an interesting looking skip sitting under cover there, I did not pluck up the courage to have a look for a good few weeks after they went, but as it did not go anywhere (and still hasn't all these months later!) and there was never anybody around, I went over the wall! The skip offered up a ton of goodies over a few hours here and there, lots of sales and bought ledgers from the 1988-1991 timeframe, mainly relating to Entertainment International which seems to have been an international distributor, and some relating to Empire, one of the more interesting is a section of bought ledgers relating to Gazza2 - all the way from buying boxes, inserts, getting boxes and badges printed, duplication, paying for the use of the image of Gazza and various magazine advert booking receipts! There is also quite a bit of stuff about Pipemania, loads of miscellaneous documents and fax copies showing games and shows they went out to license (they went after Pang and Hero Quest but got knocked back on both), also someone paid a trip to arcades in London back in the day to size up games and determine if they would likely be worth converting! There are shit-loads (three shopping baskets of 230MB optical disks!) of backup disks/tapes and CD-ROMs, mainly from the mid-90's. From cherry picking paperwork from 1988-1992, there are a number of items which are of interest - programming agreements on various titles, a load of C64/Amstrad cartridge stuff, CDTV, Konix documents (!) I literally dragged it all out of the skip and dumped it in my car, then moved it to my house, and since then have still not had a chance to go through it, but now I am in a position to, so expect a few follow-up posts over the coming weeks as I sort through it (a load of handwritten A4 pads to go through as well!). One thing I did turn up easily was a design document for Pipemania 2, which is not something that ever saw the light of day IIRC! Can someone tell me how to upload images of around 300K so I can share them with you all...? Cheers, Paul
You can always use Imageshack to host your pictures. This sounds really interesting, I hope we get pictures soon.
Amazing! Mid-90s, they published DreamWeb, Dawn Patrol and developed Pro Pinball The Web, didn't they? You'll have to go through those optical disks, tapes and cdroms and let us know what you find!
Here are some pictures courtesy of ImageShack - thanks for the link! As you can see, I have my work cut out going thorugh all of it... three baskets of 230MB Disks, and a basket and a half of Mac format CD's, I think I have mainly got image files on these. And some more paperwork! Here is the stack of paperwork to go through, and a nice box of floppies on top! The nightmare is that much of it is photocopy paper, and some are getting a bit feint, so I will have to scan in anything worth keeping - another big job. They must have gone to a CES or something back in 1989/1990, as I got a bunch of fantastic game company brochures in this lot... More paperwork and files, plus some game boxes! Those big brown envelopes on the left side are full of printouts of game boxes, manuals etc. One game per envelope. I have to say that I always thought Empire were a bit nob once they got into the 90's - Too many boring simulations and look what they did to Speedball 2100. But they did have a relationship with Sega and I have a few bits that came of that. I actually have a Jaz disc in a Pro Pinball: The Web case (along with about 15 others), and I have bought both a Jaz drive and an internal IBM drive that should read those 230MB disks, wonder how many still work, and will Vista recognise the drive?! I was really hoping to find some 80's 8-Bit stuff, but according to a colleague, they have had the skips in a few times over the years, so I bet that went in the mid 90's (I did get a fantastic colour Space Ace painting, I will take a picture and upload in the next couple of days) It does look like I have the original source disk and docs for the Psion 3a Organiser version of Pipemania! How many people can say that!!! I also got a number of BetaCam video cassettes, but have no way to watch them, any ideas? If they have gone bust, I might do some digging and pay a trip to their new office to see what they are throwing out this time. I remember when Argonaut went bust and they were based in Edgware not far from where I was living at the time. I *really* wish I had paid a visit to their bins, who knows what SNES related goodness I would have found?
Space Ace Artwork Here is the Space Ace artwork I recovered, it is really nice, and survived the skip without a scratch! It is on card, and is painted, not printed! (the glittery white lines on the Space Ace logo are brushstrokes, and it is all 'cell shaded', e.g. there is a black line around everything) I have no idea what it is for, they had a deal with Sullivan Bluth back in the early 90's, so it must have been left over from that, can't imagine they would use a painting at a trade show. Is it an original from Sullivan Bluth, did someone at Empire paint it, What do you reckon?
That is probably worth something. Sweet find! Will be interesting to find out what is on those discs too. I think they did the eJay series?
This is epic!!! Why are there no game companies near me!?!?!!? The closest thing like this that has ever happened to me was I think, around 2003 I found an old electronics store shipping hub (been closed for years) in Deer Park, New York full of rusted (but still closed from the elements) trucking trailers. They were unlocked but hard to open. Inside were boxes upon boxes of sealed N64 games (mostly commons like Crusin' USA and such). About 30% of the stuff was chewed to shreds by rats I'm guessing.I grabbed what I could carry. I made a good amount from Gamestop but had i known I would have kept as much as I could and sold them on ebay. Here's a pic of what the place looks like now. hub.jpg
I'm pretty sure this was the place. It may not be. I haven't been in the area for awhile and the neighboring park has expanded a lot since.
If those are MO (magneto optical) disks, they're supposed to have a lifetime of 50 years+, so the data will almost certainly be intact. If your IBM drive is working you shouldn't have a problem accessing the data, with one proviso... My guess is the 230MB disks are in Mac format, and contain artwork and DTP package documents (e.g. QuarkXpress files). If that's the case, Windows will probably think the disks are blank/unformatted. Whatever you do, don't write to the disks! Be sure to write-protect them before inserting in the drive (just like a floppy disk, slide the tab so there is a hole). What I would do, is create a "forensic quality" image file of each disk. That way you have *all* the data on each disk (which possibly includes deleted files), and can back up and examine the data at your leisure. Perhaps the easiest way to do that is to use a bootable Linux CD (or maybe not the easiest if you've never used Linux before!). If your drive doesn't work I could create image files of one or more of the disks for you (I'm in the UK) and get the files into a Windows-readable format. You could also try reading/backing up the backup tapes. Figuring out exactly which backup program created them might be tricky, but there could be a lot of interesting stuff on them, maybe internal email system backups etc.??? You should be able to pick up a compatible player in the professional/studio video category on eBay. It shouldn't be *hugely* expensive. I wonder what's on the tapes, perhaps they were masters for in-game FMV footage???
