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Vid Kidz |
| Vid Kidz was a company formed in 1981 be former Williams Electronics employees Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar. I recently got access to the contents of the hard drives from a development system that was owned by Vid Kidz. These hard drives contained a treasure trove of materials related to the company and the games they developed. |
Games |
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Vid Kidz was credited with the development of the following games: Blaster (1984) - Atari 5200/Atari 8 Bit - Atari (Unreleased prototype) Besides these games, the archives contain information on a number of other games that Vid Kidz may have worked on. Space Shuttle (1984)
- Pinball - Williams Conquest - The archive contains source code for this game. It appears
to have been developed to run on the Williams arcade hardware, but there
are few other details about the game. It may have been un-finished prototype. |
Documents |
Here are some of the interesting documents found in the archive vidmov.txt (Eugene P. Jarvis) - This document has an extensive back story for the game Robotron. vidsim.txt (author unknown, presumably Eugene P. Jarvis) - The GenSim Project - This documents a theoretical virtual reality project where a computer would provide inputs to all of a persons senses making them feel as if they were actually in the virtual world. If you take these two documents together, you could make a pretty good case for Eugene Jarvis having actually come up with the idea for the movie The Matrix. tronrev.txt (Eugene P. Jarvis, 7/16/82) - A review of the movie Tron. vid.txt (author unknown, presumably Eugene P. Jarvis) - The author visits an arcade and gives reviews of several games; Dig-Dug, Robby Roto, Turbo, Grand Champion, Zaxxon, and Tempest. Once you read this you will never look at Dig-Dug the same way again! vidpart2.txt (Eugene Jarvis, 7/15/82) - This appears to be a continuation of vid.txt in which Eugene reviews the arcade games, Kangaroo, Tron, Tutankham, and Caveman pinball. vidstr1.txt, vidstr2.txt (author unknown) - These are two versions of a document relating to the arcade game Stargate. If I had to guess I would say these are a response letter to someone who wrote in with a record score on Stargate. telefun.txt (author unknown) - This document describes a device that would allow TV stations to show games that a caller could control using a touch tone phone. The document makes it sound as if this device was actually developed, but it's unclear if this is actually the case. This is similar to TV POWWW where callers interacted with on-screen games by sawing the word Pow. letsmbox.txt (author unknown) - This document describes a device called the Smartbox, a combined voice/e-mail answering machine and modem. test1.txt, test2.txt, test3.txt, test4.txt, test5.txt, test6.txt - Field test reports for Space Shuttle Pinball. testh1.txt, testh2.txt, testh3.txt, testh4.txt, testh5.txt, testh6.txt, testh7.txt - Field test reports for High Speed Pinball. vidblst.txt (author unknown) - A proposal to port Blaster to a number of other computers and consoles. |
| Dan Boris - danlb_2000@yahoo.com |