Activision Patches.. Beamriders and ? look

Ok I've since learned that the Dreadnaught Destroyer patch shown is not that rare and that the Digital Press page is showing the rare variant on their site as a mistake (the triangular one). The Beamrider one is another story.

Ok, on to where these patches came from:

In the summer of 1989 I was working on my first published game for Activision called Beyond Dark Castle for the C-64 which was a port from a black & white Mac game of the same name. For the last week of the project they asked me to come work at the office in California and I did. While there I noticed this fairly large box full of Activision patches. Inside the box were individual plastic bags with various amounts of patches. I asked the producer of my project if I could take 1 of each patch from the box and he laughed, then said it would be ok. So thats what I did! (way before I had done any serious collecting other than NES carts) I think they stopped shipping out patches very soon after that as it was pretty late in the game for that stuff.

Here's some other fun info tho...

* One of the other patches I got from the box was the "common" Beamrider's patch and I'm pretty sure they were sending that one out at the time when someone wrote in for one.

* The programmer who did the Amiga port of Beyond Dark Castle is Michael Schwartz, a life-long friend of mine and gave me my first pro job doing the c-64 port. If this name sounds vaguely familliar he was the programmer/designer for Chase the Chuckwagon. He also programmed some Xonox games like Artillery Duel and Chuck Norris.

* Activision was working on Ghostbusters II for the 2600 and other systems at the time and it was nearly finished. I've been out of it for a while so if any protos have shown up since then I wouldn't be surprised.

* There was a "secret room" which somehow I was able to get a peek inside. This room only had 1 door and was packed with programmers reverse-engineering, coding for, and developing art for a new system called the Sega Genesis which was not yet in stores. I remember them using Deluxe Paint to draw some art and had some kind of Football field working on one of the units which looked a lot like Madden.