The Wizard of Wishbringer and Tour of a Dream Factory
========================= =======================
Transcribed without permission from
AmigaWorld January/February 1986, pages 70 to 73
by Kirk Davies <
[email protected]>
The Wizard of Wishbringer
=========================
A totally objective, highly critical and unbiased interview with
Infocom game designer Brian Moriarty, by Brian Moriarty.
At first I was elated when the editors of AmigaWorld asked me to review
my new Infocom story, Wishbringer. Here was a chance to sidestep the
jaded critics and bland press releases, and tell the world the truth
about the thankless life of a game designer! Eagerly I sat down and
composed a long, flowing tribute to myself, backed up by a detailed
autobiographical sketch, flattering color portraits and lengthy
examples of Wishbringer's deathless prose.
"Too biased," complained the editors after uncrating my manuscript.
"Of course it's biased," I snapped over the phone. "What did you
expect from a designer reviewing his own game?"
After a heated exchange and many threats, I agreed to ditch the review
and allow myself to be interviewed, but only on the condition that I
ask the questions as well as give the answers.
Q: How did you become a game designer at Infocom? Did you join the
company as a programmer in the microcomputer division, hacking in
machine language on Ataris, Commodores and TRS-80 Color Computers,
until one day Marc Blank, vice president and co-author of Zork, touched
you with his magic wand and made you one of the few, the proud, the
implementors?
Brain Moriarty: Yes.
Q: Wishbringer is your first game for Infocom, right? Where did you
get the idea?
BM: The design started with the game package. I was trying to think
of something neat we could include in the box, a magical item that
would tie in well with a fantasy theme. It couldn't cost too much,
maybe a quarter tops, and it had to be easy to mass produce. At first
it was going to be a magic ring. But that's been done so many times
before - Wagner, Tolkien, Donaldson, etcetera - that I decided to make
it a rock instead. The story emerged from that.
Q: Describe the story in excruciating detail.
BM: [Sigh] Oh, all right. You play the part of a mail clerk in a
small seaside village called Festerton. Your mean old boss, Postmaster
Crisp, orders you to deliver a mysterious envelope to the Magick Shoppe
on the far side of town.
When you get to the Shoppe, you meet an old woman who asks you to read
the envelope. It turns out that her pet cat's been kidnapped by
somebody called the Evil One. The ransom is Wishbringer, a magic stone
famous in local legends. Your mission, should you choose to accept it,
is to rescue the cat without getting turned into a furry toilet seat
cover.
When you return to the village, everything is screwed up. All the
familiar landmarks are twisted into sinister new forms. The streets
are patrolled by giant army boots. Trolls, vultures, hellhounds and
grues make your life difficult, and everything's under the all-powerful
eye of the Evil One.
Fortunately, you're not alone. Friendly pelicans, platypuses and
seahorses will help you if you're nice to them. And if you really get
stuck, you can invoke the power of Wishbringer, the Magic Stone of
Dreams.
Q: Infocom is famous for its clever packaging. What do you get when
you buy Wishbringer?
BM: Besides the glow-in-the-dark magic stone, you get a facsimile of
the mysterious special-delivery envelope from the Evil One, a fold-out
color map of Festerton and a booklet, The Legend of Wishbringer, that
explains the origins of the stone and how to use it to make wishes.
Oh, and you get a disk, too.
Q: Wishbringer is billed as an Introductory Level game. Is it really
just for beginners, or can veteran players enjoy it?
BM: Most of the problems in the story have two or more solutions.
The easy way out is to use Wishbringer. If a beginner gets frustrated,
he can whip out the magic stone, mumble a wish and keep on playing.
Experienced players can search for one of the logical solutions - a bit
harder, perhaps, but more satisfying. It's possible to complete the
story without using any of the stone's seven wishes. In fact, that's
the only way to earn the full 100 points.
The puzzles are highly interconnected. Once you start wishing your
problems away, it's very hard to continue playing without relying more
and more on the magic stone. The impotence of idle wishing - that's
the moral of Wishbringer. All really good stories have a moral.
Q: How long did it take you to write this moral tale?
BM: I started coding in September of 1984. In December, I deleted
most of what I'd written and started again. The disks went out for
duplication on May 1st, so I guess it took nine months altogether.
That's fairly typical for an Infocom title.
Q: How is an Infocom story developed, anyway? What kind of computer
do you use?
BM: Glad you asked. Infocom's Z Development System is based on a
DECSystem-20 mainframe, a machine that resembles a fleet of red
refrigerators. All of the game designers are connected to it, so it's
easy for us to share code and ideas and to play each other's games.
The programming language we use was created expressly for writing
interactive fiction. It's called ZIL (for Zork Implementation
Language). ZIL "knows" about concepts like rooms, objects, characters
and the passage of time. It has instructions the designer can use to
manipulate these concepts in very sophisticated ways.
ZIL itself is written in a LISP-like language called MDL, or Muddle,
which was developed at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Because
ZIL and its utilities operate in a high level environment, it's
relatively easy for us to tinker around with things and make
incremental improvements.
Q: Infocom games are available on every home computer I can think of.
It must take a lot of programmers to do so many conversions!
BM: Naw. The Z System produces machine-independant code that can be
executed on just about any computer with enough disk space and RAM.
All we have to do is write a single machine-language interpreter for
the computer in question. Once the interpreter is running, all of our
present and future titles become available for that machine.
The Amiga interpreter was relatively painless. We simply downloaded
the 68000 Kernal developed for the Macintosh and Atari ST systems and
changed the I/O to make it work with the Amiga's operating system.
Q: One of the Amiga's big selling features is its graphics. Why don't
Infocom's games use graphics?
BM: Why aren't all books illustrated? [Pausing for effect] Should we
succumb to the temptation to throw in lots of cartoony pictures and
special effects just because the hardware is capable of it? We'd
rather invest our time in writing better stories, more evocative prose,
making the user interface as transparent as possible, and getting rid
of every bug we can find. We think these efforts result in a better
interactive experience than what has been achieved by "graphics
adventures." Our sales suggest that we're right.
That's not to say Infocom will never do graphics. We've been actively
working on some graphics-oriented ideas for a couple of years now. But
if the day comes when we offer a graphics entertainment product, you
can be sure it won't be Zork With Pictures.
Q: What about Cornerstone, Infocom's powerful, yet oh-so-easy-to-use
database system for the IBM PC? Will there be a version for the Amiga?
BM: It's technically possible. Marketingwise, I suppose it depends on
how many machines are bought and what types of people buy them. You
never know.
Q: What about you? Got any more game ideas?
BM: I've started work on a big science-fantasy game that will be
released some time in 1986. The story has an interesting historical
angle. That's all I can say about it now... except that it will
definitely not be for beginners!
Wishbringer author Brian Moriarty, 28, is the newest member of
Infocom's team of interactive fiction authors. He brings to the medium
the stern morality of a rural New England upbringing and a lifelong
passion for the fantastic. Write to him (or he'll write to himself)
c/o Infocom Inc.,
125 Cambridge Park Drive,
Cambridge,
MA 02140.
Tour of a Dream Factory by Bob Liddil
=======================
Near a busy thruway, on the second floor of a large multi-story building,
is a place that manufactures dreams: Infocom. Their new location, a
carpeted art deco suite of offices and cubbyholes, is where adventures
are created and produced for an eager public.
It is whisper quiet here. I am introduced to Brian Moriarty, the author
of Wishbringer, who interrupts his new project to welcome me to Infocom.
His tiny cubicle is personalized to the taste of a highly creative writer
and programmer who has been around computers since before micros. He's
an animated speaker, and talks in glowing praise of what it means to
write an Infocom adventure.
"We don't clutter up the programs with pictures," he says, referring to
the graphics-style adventures that mainstayed the markets of other micros
in the past. "We let the words and descriptions tell our stories."
It's true. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a new Infocom offering for
the Amiga, is a rollicking compliment to British author Douglas Adam's
wry wit and general distaste for the mundane. Not a single byte is given
to graphics, but the "pictures" are as eloquent as murals.
The computer in Brian's office is actually a terminal connected to a
climate-controlled traditional mainframe coyly referred to as "Mother."
The games are written in a sort of universal interpreter, which in turn
writes the machine-specific coding that becomes the adventure.
"Each adventure is its own universe," I am told, as we stroll down the
corridors, popping in on assorted authors in various stages of their
work. "Sometimes it takes more than one disk to tell the whole story,
like Zork, for example."
Zork was originally written as a hacker's improvement on the concept of
the original adventure, a noun/verb affair that offered little true
interaction. It evolved into such a huge program that it had to be
divided into three episodes of one compete disk each. Zork for the Amiga
is ultra streamlined and sentence sensitive, as in "Get the ax and kill
the dwarf," or "Roll up the rug and raise the trap door."
At the end of the corridor is an empty, silent room, an old computers'
home and a graveyard for "dead" computers. There is a Dragon 64 from
Tano, which never made it to general use, a couple of TRS-80 Model I's
and a model III, some Sinclairs, an early Apple, assorted Commodores and
Atari's, even a Tandy Color Computer. Infocom adventures are compatible
with all these machines and a few more. Across the hallway is a room
full of IBM PCs and their clones, a "McApple" and a sparkling new Amiga.
The Amiga is surrounded by enthusiastic Infocom staffers trying out a new
game. Needless to say, with ten minutes of hands-on experience and a
screenful of Wishbringer, I was hooked.
In my brief visit to Infocom, I discovered the secret to their quiet yet
phenomenal success: The people of the company, from the woman at the
front door who answers the phone, to the MIT hacker alumni who prowl
the corridors and depths of Mother's memory core. They are the soul of
each adventure that bears the company logo. Theirs is a pride born of
ability and the refusal to market anything but excellence - an attitude
that carries over to the consumer who plays each game knowing he is not
being looked down upon.
In the Infocom dream factory's quest for the consummate adventure, it is
the consumer who is, ultimately, always the winner.
