Marble Madness II: Marble Man prototype arcade machine at California Extreme 2007

If you think the Internet is the best source for preservation, I would say that it is unlikely to be the case. With as much information as is created online, a lot gets lost, missed, glossed over. I would hope that they have a better handle on the preservation of the files in a meaningful way.

 

As I mentioned above, it's the original programmer that is opposed to the ROMs being released (no idea way really, I don't think he even has a working game), not the owner of the games that come to California Extreme. In fact, he's responsible for the release of several Atari prototype arcade games....

He was given permission to make copies of the ROMs so he could get his games working under a promise that he would never release them.

Also, as has been mentioned, the ROMs are dumped and archived and it's even been emulated. And there's more than one person out there with a working board set, so it's not impossible that it will be released the general public some day. But it won't be lost, no need to worry about that.

 

Thanks for the responses, it seems then that the original programmer may be just not happy with the final product enough for it to be out there.

Interesting about the internet and preservation though. I always thought the Mame project was about preservation or at least that's what the developers claim it was. But that's another topic I guess.

 

Indeed it was, but now they are starting to run into issues with actually using it for preservation. It's an interesting read really

 

I kind of recall being told that the game designer (Bob Flanagan) was very unhappy with Atari cancelling his game. Though it performed very poorly in test markets with both trackballs and joysticks. Why he's still against the release after all these years I don't know.

 

Who knows? Stuff like this happens all the time though. I've got several Atari prototype roms (2600, 7800, 8-bit, etc) that I can't release for various reasons. Sometimes the programmer is still afraid that the company they worked for will come after them (highly unlikely after 30+ years), sometimes they don't want it floating around the internet (sort of anti-emulation, but it's more than that), sometimes they just don't want people making reproductions and making money off their hard work. I've yet to run into someone who didn't want a game released because they were ashamed of it, but I suppose that could also be a valid reason.