Post by PikaFusion on Jun 25, 2021 19:28:05 GMT
It's been a while since this thread was last updated, so I'm going to briefly summarize what we know so far.
The original Beebiss ad was from a company named Play It Again. In that ad, it mentions that Play It Again was formerly Forest Hills Used Video Game Cartridges. We know from a few sources, like this NYT article, that Forest Hills UVGC was run by Neil Levin and Robert Schwartz.
We were able to contact Neil Levin through Linkedin, and I called and spoke to him over the phone. My most recent call with him can be found here. We mostly talked about his career in selling video games because some people were interested in that. We spoke only very briefly about Play It Again, as he says he had nothing to do with that company, having only worked at Forest Hills UVGC. From this we can conclude that the person most likely responsible for the original ad was most likely Robert Schwartz.
We didn't talk about Robert much, as he said he hasn't spoken to or thought about him since the mid 80s. In the first call, he merely said that he knew him, and that he would do things like put fake listings in his ads. And in the second call, saying that "he was a character". Neil firmly believes that Beebiss never existed in any form, and you can hear him say as much in the first call at this timestamp.
It appears that the only person who can possibly say for certain what Beebiss was, is Robert Schwartz. We have tried contacting Robert multiple times through some phone numbers we thought might be associated with him, and by mailing him a letter to an address we found. Unfortunately, he have yet to make any contact. In fact, we don't even know if Mr. Schwartz is still alive.
But I believe, that with the information we do have, I think we can safely assume that Beebiss never existed in any form as any kind of actual game. Not an alternate title for an existing game, or a cancelled game, or a mistranslation. People throw around the term Copyright Trap pretty loosely when talking about this kind of thing, as that is what it is colloquially called. But sometimes people get hung up on that terminology, and assume it's a means toward legal action. While this can sometimes be the case, they're often just employed to keep on eye on what people, such as your competitors, are doing. There have been countless examples of such things for as long as printed media has existed.
So, I think we can called this one solved, in my opinion. It's not the answer anyone, myself included, was hoping for. But I think the best assumption that we can make is that this was simply a false listing, made by an guy with an interesting sense of humor.
I only listened to a bit of the new video, but yes much better audio so far