Vintage Letters from Companies

[Dangerboy]

Not sure if anyone else would get a kick out these, but I figured I'd share.

I found these while cleaning out some old collection boxes.

This was a letter that Sunsoft sent out if you tried sending in the postcard to win a free copy of Aero the Acrobat. The trick to the quest was there was some 2-page Ad in a gaming magazine, with what looked like a huge classifieds section. If you looked closely, there was a small ad that read "To try and get the game free, send in your name, etc etc" There were 100 total copies available.

http://www.game-rave.com/aero.gif

The other is a tad personal, and truth be told, speaks volumes both about me in general, and Sega themselves. Around the tender age of 16, me and two friends were fed up with the random things Sega was doing wrong. Sonic CD's changed soundtrack, the censoring of Rage 3, and the god awful Jurassic Park games. I think we bitched about the lack of RPGs or something. After what could only considered a "fanboy lashing" of a letter emailed to Sega out of pure dumb boredom, we actually got a response letter from them.

http://www.game-rave.com/sega_letter.gif

What makes me laugh now is reading this, and then thinking of all the crappy Sonic games, severe lack of RPGs still, etc. And yes, I still scream at companies. : )

Regardless, just thought I'd share. ^_^

[super nes]

Thats pretty cool that they wrote back to you i remember sending a letter about having something to do with the sega cd but never got a responce...

[thahurricanegame]

I think this is a super awesome thread! Wow man cool stuff.

Can you believe how far we've come? And gaming in general.

I bet all of those folks don't do anything for Sega anymore (considering they only have a few people hired possibly these days).

[exit]

Soo....tell us more about that free news letter.

[Press_Start]

Reminds me when I mailed Capcom my designs for robots masters as the result of inspiration from playing Megaman 8. (Don't care what people say, the anime cutscenes rocked! :rocker: ).

Although they turned me down, the letter they sent had an awesome colleague with Capcom's All-Stars in the background, Megaman, Strider, Captain Commando, etc. It was SWEET! :D

Now where did I put that letter? :?

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

The subject matter of mine will totally shock you.

http://www.thelogbook.com/odyssey/magazine/letter/letter.jpg

[Sanriostar]

Earl:
I had to re-read your letter twice to make sure there was no Calmed Beef Min or Rubbing Nipples.

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

No, it was in response to me asking why Activision wasn't busting Magnavox's door down to make super awesome Odyssey2 versions of the games they had going on the other systems. :bawling:

[Dangerboy]

That rules, Earl.

I need to find the "You're a tad late" letter I got from Sony when I tried to win the 10 Million PSX from them...8 years too late. : )

[Ruudos]

I once wrote a letter to Club Nintendo as kid that I got two new games. While the letter wasn't published in the magazine, I did receive a letter back from them.

[Lady Jaye]

I once wrote an email to Steve Wozniak (in 2000) and got a lengthy email back from him (sign that he was involved in the response: the amount of details included on the making of Breakout).

Here it is (nevermind my old email address, that's at my old job...)


----- Original Message ----

----------
From: Steve Wozniak <host@woz.org>
To: <xxxxxx@transat.com>
Subject: Re: Form posted from Internet Explorer
Date: Tue, May 30, 2000, 6:15


on 2000.05.29 1:39 PM, xxxxxx@transat.com at xxxxxxx@transat.com wrote:

> Hi Woz! I only recently started to read more about you and am currently
> reading the book Infinite Loop (about Apple). I was astounded (in a good way!)
> to learn that you were the programmer behind the original Breakout game
> (Atari). I adore that game and have a copy of Super Breakout for the Super
> Nintendo. How exactly did you code the game? Was it done in a particular
> computer language?

The game was designed before any arcade games had been built that were
software. So I did it all with chips, about 44 TTL chips, mostly gates and
registers but also a 256 x 1 RAM chip or some such thing.

When I built the Apple ][ I wanted to make it special. I decided that since
I'd designed the hardware and the BASIC that my goal would be to create a
machine that could PROGRAM Breakout in BASIC. I had color and graphics and
hi-res. I added paddles and sound and some BASIC commands for drawing lines
and plotting pixels. Then I sat down one evening to write the game. It took
only about 20 minutes to have things working a bit. I then made dozens of
variations over the next half hour. This included things like the colors of
the bricks, the paddle and ball characteristics, messages, scoring, etc. It
would have taken years to have made this many variations in hardware. I was
shaking with this excitement. I told Steve Jobs that the world of arcade
games would never be the same now that they could be done in software. This
was in 1976. My hardware design had probably been in 1974.
>
> BTW, my family has been using Macs since the late 80s (we went from the SE/30
> to the IIcx (which I now own), to the Quadra 650 to the G3. All these
> computers are amazing by their lasting quality, despite their somewhat slow
> processor and lack of memory.
>
> I'm glad to see that you've remained grounded despite all your successes.
> You're a good man, and I like that. :)

Thanks. I'm very lucky about that. I'm not out to make tons of money nor
have great successes nor to prove myself or I'd probably be a lot more
phony.

--

Steve Wozniak <mailto:woz@mac.com> <http://woz.org>

[tom]

True Story:
Upon release I purchased Return to Zork for my PC back in the days, I filled out the registration form and send it off to Activision (UK). On this form they asked for suggestions and 'what kind of game you'd like to see in the future' and I thought I give it a try and I asked for the Activison VCS range to be put on disk/CD for the PC.
I did get a reply that they have no plans to do this, but in the meantime 'we did put the Infocom range on disks, NOT CD' (printed in caps). I still have the letter, a nice folder, Activision envelope, business flyer and two Infocom flyers. Nice stuff.

Soon afterwards the Activision 2600 Action Packs did appear on PC/Mac.
I claim to be a bit responsible for this :-)

[Oobgarm]

I sent a letter to Kemco a long time ago(1989-1990), complaining about how difficult it was to get anywhere in Shadowgate for the NES. As a young pup playing the game for the first time, I couldn't even get off the first screen.

They sent a letter back, apologizing for the difficulties I was having, and offered some tips on what to do. I made it through the whole game, and it's now one of my all-time favorites.

If I ever find it(unlikely), I'll scan it.

[eskobar]

I remember that Squaresoft offered a free soundtrack as promotion for Secret of Mana. You had to make a drawing with SoM theme and mail it to the address in the add.

Being in Mexico i thought that they would just ignore my letter.... but surprisingly the soundtrack arrived in a bubble envelope with the Square logo on it and a greeting letter.

I was so happy to get that letter that i became a huge fan of SoM series... i still have that letter and sountrack if someone want to see it :D

[slapdash]

Ha ha... I actually WON one of the copies of Aero The Acrobat, and I have two or three letters from Odyssey Adventure...

Boy, wish I had the time to dig out and scan all of my old letters...

[FrakAttack]

Still have a letter somewhere from Starpath answering some questions about Dragonstomper. For those still curious, they said that "the lantern has no use" as its function was unimplemented in the final product due to time constraints.

[slapdash]

Wow, that's pretty cool... Strangely direct and admissive...

[Ed Oscuro]

I had to look twice when I saw "Odyssey" and "mainframe" in the same sentence. Even back then that would've been a joke :)

Also, I wish I had a letter from Sunsoft, dangit...more interested in the Batman games though.

[qbertandernie]

i bought some old 3.5" PC games recently and several of them had letters responding to glitch complaints the user had sent to the company, along with patch discs. i thought those were interesting, and was kind of surpised the companies would have sent out the discs to fix the issues the guy had with the games. one of the discs looked like they just pulled a random disc out of an employees desk and rewrote it...its got a manufactured label for a different game and a generic label printed off of a computer stuck over it.

ill see if i can figure out the scanner and post em...

i dont think the same level of service would be had by people complaining to companies these days...

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't think I've got many (if any) games that were made by companies so small that they were just sending out random disks with bugfixes on them, though! It doesn't surprise me that would happen, but I agree it's interesting. If you had a letter about some specific bug noticed by that particular user that'd be pretty cool as well; the letters I've seen were all form letters explaining how to use disks made up in batches as last-minute bugfixes (or shipped out to users after the fact).

[rolenta]

Here's my response from Prima when I tried submitting Phoenix to them in 1993:

[Ed Oscuro]

Ouch.

I just picked up a new copy of Prima's Thief II guide at the thrift the other day...nothing against them except they don't seem to, ah, use the highest standards for graphics and copy-editing and whatnot. Not that they have bad writers, and I understand it's a difficult job writing game guides. It's just that...yeah, screw them, anyway. :)

[GreatBazunka]

on the modern front, i emailed Nintendo complaining about the lack of Wii and they called me and let me buy one directly.

[Xian042]

I sent a letter to Nintendo Power telling them they should let people order maps and guides right from the magazine. This was probably in the early 90's or very late 80's. I even threatened them saying I'd send the idea to another magazine if they didnt take my idea!
I got a formal letter from Howard I think thanking me for my idea and urging me to keep reading Nintendo Power! I hope I find it someday!

[BydoEmpire]

I still have the letter, but no scan. Back in early/mid 80s I sent Datasoft a bunch of sketches of game ideas and got a "thanks, but we already have plenty of game ideas to keep us busy." I thought it was cool that they responded, although it was practically a form letter.

[FABombjoy]

In 92, Namco ran a contest to find game testers. Me and a buddy applied and made it into the final round. We didn't make the cut, but considering we were high school freshmen, I'm surprised we made it that far :D

[FABombjoy]

And apparently I submitted some kind of awesome Joe Montana II score. I wish they printed it so I could try & beat it today.

[Gapporin]

In 92, Namco ran a contest to find game testers. Me and a buddy applied and made it into the final round. We didn't make the cut, but considering we were high school freshmen, I'm surprised we made it that far :D

Ken Lobb used to be a tester for Namco? Interesting...

[Nitrosport]

Not sure if anyone else would get a kick out these, but I figured I'd share.

I found these while cleaning out some old collection boxes.

This was a letter that Sunsoft sent out if you tried sending in the postcard to win a free copy of Aero the Acrobat. The trick to the quest was there was some 2-page Ad in a gaming magazine, with what looked like a huge classifieds section. If you looked closely, there was a small ad that read "To try and get the game free, send in your name, etc etc" There were 100 total copies available.

http://www.game-rave.com/aero.gif

The other is a tad personal, and truth be told, speaks volumes both about me in general, and Sega themselves. Around the tender age of 16, me and two friends were fed up with the random things Sega was doing wrong. Sonic CD's changed soundtrack, the censoring of Rage 3, and the god awful Jurassic Park games. I think we bitched about the lack of RPGs or something. After what could only considered a "fanboy lashing" of a letter emailed to Sega out of pure dumb boredom, we actually got a response letter from them.

http://www.game-rave.com/sega_letter.gif

What makes me laugh now is reading this, and then thinking of all the crappy Sonic games, severe lack of RPGs still, etc. And yes, I still scream at companies. : )

Regardless, just thought I'd share. ^_^

I can't see these. Can you re-upload them? I really want to see the letter from Sega. :)

[bust3dstr8]

This is a great letter that was posted up at PCFX a while ago.


http://www.joeredifer.com/crap/snkletter.jpg

[tcv]

Hooo boy, I think I agree with The Game Lord in a lot of respects. Neo Geo was just too different from the consoles of the time that it was hard to compare it.