ARCADIAN
1-1-1983

OPPORTUNITY (?)

Well, Astrocade bit the dust Thursday, asking protection from creditors under 
the provisions of the infamous Chapter 11. The latest news report from Nitron 
is attached - they stopped trading on Friday "pending news", and there is a 
possibility they may drop as well - see your papers.

So where does that leave us? Well, of the various options, it seems to me that 
there is opportunity here for the third party vendors (TPV) to step in because 
the only game in town now is the TPV GROUP (pun intended). Only you fellows 
have material for the unit.

There are lots of owners out there, and they will either be

1) left in the lurch if the whole thing collapses never to be seen again.

2) left in a hesitancy period while a Receiver is chosen and restructuring of 
the 'new' Astrocade company is completed.

3) same as 2) until a new company buys out the assets and starts up.

Under any one of those three - or anything else, I would guess - there will be 
a void that can be filled by the T --- an opportunity to step forward and 
present wares to ... who?

Timing - the CES is right now, who's there? All those distributor guys who know 
where dealers are - the ones still in step. The best time/place to get in touch 
with outlets. It seems to me that a best-foot-forward approach to the 
distributors, etc., that will be there is the only thing to do. Dick Houser and 
I plan to function as your collective agent, essentially representing everyone 
in the Sourcebook. We will be pushing the Sourcebook to the distributors - 
whoever is left - with the message that we can be the bridge of available stock 
that can tide the dealers over until the reconstructed Arcade is back in 
production. This representation scheme is only temporary, to take advantage of 
the opportunity presenting itself. We've been noodling about in this area in a 
sort of wishy-washy way - now we can be definitive and make those contacts that 
are available.

Who else? Well there are thousands of machines in owners' hands and we can get 
at a few of them through advertising in the game publications. What have been 
the replies from the Electronic Games ad? This kind of advertising should be 
looked into as a possible on-going thing.

And also, we can make contact with 8 or 9000 owners that I have from mailing 
lists, for direct mailings. These are not subscribers, so they are not normally 
contacted. Also, I'm sure a number of them are no longer interested or owners. 
Anyway, a package of literature can be shipped to alert these people to TPV 
existence.

OTHER STUFF------

Game Production: The Alternative Engineering people are now geared up to 
produce cartridges for the Arcade unit, utilizing EPROMs. They will also handle 
distribution - contact them if you have a program that you would like to have 
prepared in the cartridge format-- certainly a better way to get a program into 
a machine than tape, and there's more capacity.