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Warren Spector Donates 20 Boxes :: posted 03.18.08 by Zach Vowell

Another of the archive's first donors made his first donation on March 18, as Warren Spector generously handed over twenty boxes of documents, games, hardware, and artifacts to the archive. The donation included 14 linear feet of documents spanning Spector's career from his days at Steve Jackson Games to his tenure at Ion Storm's Austin studio, roughly a fifteen-year period. Spector also gave the archive's library of games and hardware a big jolt by donating over 100 videogames and 5 console systems (with all their assorted peripherals included).


First page of "Shooter" design document, dated 10/21/97. Spector (Warren) Papers, UT Videogame Archive.
Some of the more fascinating documentation include a series of design documents for a game Spector then called "Shooter" — later, this game concept evolved into the much-beloved Deus Ex. There are also copious amounts of Spector's correspondence, notebooks, and marked-up design documents that all show Spector's intense design process at work, as well as the colleagues and associates that helped him hone his vision.

Then there's the juvenilia. Part of Spector's donation included files his mother kept in New York City, where Spector was raised. Aside from revealing many interesting facts (such as Spector's participation in his school's Glee Club), many of the schoolwork files document Spector's early and profound fascination with motion pictures and storytelling in general. It's no wonder, after discovering that Spector took film courses at Horace Mann School and focused on film studies at Northwestern University, that Spector chose to pursue graduate work in film at the University of Texas at Austin.

And once he arrived in Austin, well, that's where it gets really interesting. We'll have to leave it to another time to finish that story, because first we need to arrange and describe the materials to make them accessible for research. Besides, it will take months to thoroughly examine everything he donated this time around.


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