I discovered a recent article at Gamasutra that is well worth reading, particularly for developers. It concerns proper archiving (and lack thereof) of game production assets, in order to preserve them for the future. Most Minis developers are fairly young, but I do hope that they are properly backing up all development source code and media assets, so that such artifacts are not simply lost forever someday. At the very least, don't actively throw your stuff out!
One of the interviewees, Jeff Vavasour, is a developer with whom I have spoken myself (though not on this subject), and one of the article commenters, Marty Goldberg, is a well-known Atari community member who has worked alongside another Atari community member, Curt Vendel, on assorted projects with the current Atari (e.g., they developed the recent Atari Flashback products). Both are also Atari archivists and have been working on a pair (?) of Atari history books.
The article mentions an "electronics manufacturer that once previously produced video game consoles and software . . . [and which] did promise to further investigate why its historic video game legacy could not be found in its own internal archive." Any guesses who this might be? I'm thinking NEC, makers of the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16.
