Reprinted from GAMES Magazine (1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
NY 10019) of August/September 1987. Copyright (c) 1987
THEY TAKE THE HIGH-TECH ROAD TO ADVENTURE
With Infocom's interactive fiction, you don't just read about a search
for buried treasure -- you take part in one. Take a peek inside one
software company that produces some of today's most innovative
computer adventure games.
by Burt Hochberg
"YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING."
That simple sentence, though lacking the momentousness of, say, "In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," proved to have
its own modest impact. It is the opening sentence of Adventure, the
original computer adventure game. Adventure begat Zork I, which begat
Zork II, which begat Zork III, which begat Enchanter, Sorcerer, and
Spellbreaker. Those games (not counting Adventure), and the 20 or so
others that the collective genius known as Infocom has since begotten,
have spawned a multi-million-dollar industry: all-text computer
adventure games, or, to use the term Infocom prefers, interactive
fiction.
An interactive fiction game is a story that requires the hero to
find treasures, solve a crime, outsmart an evil sorcerer, or
accomplish some other more or less heroic feat by solving a chain of
interlocking puzzles. A puzzle can be as simple as opening a door or
as perplexing as figuring out what to do when you meet yourself coming
through a warp in time. The player, who is in fact the hero of the
story, interacts with the game by telling the computer, via the
keyboard, what he wants to do (for instance, GO WEST, KNOCK ON THE
DOOR). The computer, in turn, provides clues in the course of telling
the player what he "sees" and "hears" (see box, page 17).
Although fantasy is a common genre (the Zork and Enchanter
trilogies, for example), interactive fiction comes in many flavors --
treasure hunts (Infidel), mysteries (Suspect), science fiction
(Planetfall), comedy (Leather Goddesses of Phobos) -- and can even
treat such serious themes as nuclear war (Trinity) and totalitarianism
(A Mind Forever Voyaging).
Adventure, the grandaddy of computer adventure games, was
programmed by Willie Crowther and Don Woods in the mid-1970s. The only
people who could play the game then (it is now available for home
computers on the disk Golden Oldies, Volume One, from Country
Software) were computer researchers with access to Arpanet, a
communications network for mainframe computers installed at major
research institutions. One of those institutions was the Artificial
Intelligence Lab at MIT.
"When Adventure arrived at MIT," wrote Infocom game designer Tim
Anderson in an article on the history of Zork, "the reaction was
typical: after everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving
the game (it's estimated that Adventure set the entire computer
industry back two weeks), the true lunatics began to think about how
they could do it better."
Among the "true lunatics" at MIT were Anderson, Bruce Daniels, Marc
Blank, Dave Lebling, and Joel Berez. By day they sat hunched over
computer terminals creating programming tools for the government; by
night they sat hunched over computer terminals creating a world.
"Zork was done as a midnight programming project, as a reaction to
Adventure," says Berez, the first and only president of Infocom, a
quietly authoritative man of 32 who hardly looks old enough to shave,
let alone run a thriving high-tech corporation. "Adventure was lots of
fun, but with our advanced technology and the literary skills of some
of the people involved, we thought we could do a better job."
"Zork," a nonsense word popular among MIT hackers in those days,
was often used as a working title for programs that were in
development, and it was used for the game that would make computing
history. In 1979, Berez, Anderson, Lebling, Blank, Chris Reeve, Stu
Galley and a few of their MIT cohorts decided to form a company,
mainly to insure that there would be life after MIT. They agreed that
the company's name would be Infocom, Inc., that its address would be
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that they didn't know what to do next.
"We fooled around for a while, thinking of various ideas," says
Lebling, the co-author (with Marc Blank) of the mainframe Zork, the
Zork trilogy, and Enchanter, and the author of Starcross, Suspect,
Spellbreaker, and The Lurking Horror. Lebling had been a political
science major at MIT before he found his true calling at the
Artificial Intelligence Lab. "Then Marc and Joel brought up the
subject of Zork. 'This silly thing may have commercial potential,'
they said. 'We'll never get something exactly like it on a
microcomputer, but we can certainly get a piece of it.' So we sat down
and chopped it into chunks."
The final version of the mainframe Zork was twice the size of
Adventure, and with new material added during the conversion, it
proved to have more than enough chunks for three games: Zorks I, II,
and III.
Now that the company had a product, the next problems were
manufacturing and marketing it. With no factory, no business
experience (Berez was then attending business school), and only enough
money to buy lunch for a week, the young executives decided to offer
their game to software publishers. Personal Software, Inc. took it on
in June 1980, began selling a TRS-80 version in December, and in nine
months had sold a grand total of 1,500 copies -- not a number to make
an entrepreneur drool, but it was a start. An Apple version, released
in early 1981, did better: Greeted by enthusiastic reviews, it sold
more than 6,000 copies in eight months.
Thus encouraged, in June 1981 Infocom licensed its second product,
Zork II, to Personal Software. But it soon became clear that Infocom
and Personal Software were not a happy couple.
So Berez, et al. decided to go it alone. With the royalties they
had earned on Zork I, plus an appallingly large part of their life
savings and a bank loan, they moved into a larger office, bought
equipment, and hired a staff. Infocom was on its way.
Considering the severe restrictions Infocom placed on its product
-- not just software but games, not just games but adventure games,
not just adventure games but text-only adventure games -- the
company's success has been remarkable. While makers of adventure games
that use graphics have come and gone, Infocom remains near the top of
the heap. As it turns out, their opting for all-text games has proven
to be anything but a liability: Since no memory is wasted on pictures,
Infocom's games can achieve a greater complexity, which seems to
translate into greater sales. To date, Zork I has sold half a million
copies, all three Zorks nearly one million; the Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy has sold 250,000 copies since its release in the fall of
1985; and 50,000 copies of Leather Goddesses of Phobos were sold in
its first 10 weeks. Last year the company grossed a cool $10 million,
and that is a number to make an entrepreneur drool.
What is it about Infocom games that makes so many people so eager
to part with $40 or $50 to get one? "We have an endless debate about
what people enjoy in our games," says Berez. "But after doing two
dozen or so of them, we've learned a lot about what makes this
particular form of entertainment appealing."
First, there are the intriguing stories, strong plots, believable
situations, and colorful locations that get the player involved and
make him eager to find out what happens next.
Then there's the evocative writing, which is particularly important
in the absence of pictures. "Without pictures," says Berez, "all
that's left is your imagination."
Also important is the innovative packaging, designed by Carl
Genatossio and his Creative Services department. Each game comes with
an instruction manual (written by Elizabeth Langosy), a magazine or
comic book (or, in the case of a mystery game, an evidence dossier)
containing various direct or oblique hints, and a useful gadget (a
decoder, a scratch 'n' sniff card, a balloon). Says Genatossio, "Since
we don't have graphics in our games, we put the graphics in the
package."
Finally there are the puzzles.
Here's Steve Meretzky, a 30-year-old MIT graduate and former
construction project manager who came to Infocom as a part-time tester
and went on to create Planetfall, Sorcerer, Hitchhiker (with Douglas
Adams), and others: "At any given point there should be lots of
puzzles confronting you, and you shouldn't necessarily know which ones
can be solved at that point. If at any moment there were only one
puzzle to work on, the story line would be much more linear and you
would lose one of the main aspects of interactive fiction."
What makes for a good puzzle? Though Meretzky has no definitive
answer, he does say a puzzle "should be logical, according to the
logic of the game's universe. In a fantasy game, a puzzle can rely on
magic, but the magic must be consistent throughout the game. A puzzle
should be original in some way, not just a rehash of an earlier puzzle
with different objects."
Meretzky knows whereof he speaks. He's the creator of one of the
most elegant puzzles in the entire Infocom oeuvre: the time-travel
paradox in Sorceror. The paradox results from meeting yourself when
you are older -- which means, of course, that when you are older, you
meet yourself when you are younger. So that this can occur, the
younger you receives from the older you a combination to a lock. The
combination enables you to progress long enough to become the older
you, at which time you must realize that it is essential to give the
combination to the younger you. Otherwise you'll both cease to exist.
Got it? Well, you have to be there.
Fairness, or the lack of it, is another quality Infocom checks for
in its puzzles. "That's one of the things our testers look for," says
Lebling. "Is the writer pulling a rabbit out of a hat or do you see
the fuzzy ears first?"
One earless rabbit turned up during the testing of Hollywood
Hijinx, a tricky treasure hunt in the Malibu mansion of Buddy Burbank,
king of the B-movies. The game begins in front of the mansion, where
you see a statue. Before being able to solve a puzzle, you must
recognize that the statue can be moved. When the testers complained
that forcing players to discover this fact on their own was asking too
much, the program was modified. Now, if you move to another location
and then return to the statue, the computer tells you that its
position has changed (you'll have to figure out for yourself why
that's important).
But an Infocom game is much more than just a well-written story
with puzzles -- it is also a computer program, and the programming is
inseparably intertwined with the writing.
The writers work directly on computer terminals, inputting a
combination of computer code (the program itself) and English text
(what the player sees on the screen). "Sometimes you have only a
sketchy outline and are just beginning to coalesce the geography [of
the world the player moves in]," says Meretzky. "Sometimes the
geography coalesces around the puzzles. Sometimes it's both together."
Sometimes there's no coalescing at all. Getting stuck is a writer's
occupational hazard, and Infocom writers suffer just like all other
writers. Recognizing their creative agonies, Infocom has seen to it
that they don't suffer alone. Each Tuesday all the writers gather for
lunch in the conference room and spend two or three hours suffering
together. Here they bounce ideas (also paper cups, scrunched-up lunch
wrappers, and pencils) off one another, fly paper airplanes, and
discuss what Lebling describes as "general garbage like Toobees and
Shirley MacLaine's reincarnation theories, rumors, puzzles, the best
way to do something in a story, and progress reports."
A game of interactive fiction is an intricate mechanism. Gremlins
lurk everywhere, and they have a disconcerting way of popping up when
least expected.
"It's very rare these days for a customer to find a serious bug,"
says Meretzky, himself a former tester. "But in the early days, when
we had only one or two testers, it wasn't too uncommon for a game to
go out with three or four crashes in it."
The worst example of a crash, in his view, was in the first
released version of Zork III. Near the end of the game you must leave
an object in front of a beam of light to open a door. Soon you meet
the Dungeon Master outside a prison cell. You go south to enter the
cell, the DM pushes a few buttons, the cell (with you in it) is
teleported to the Zork treasure room, you exit north from the cell,
claim the treasure, and win the game. But if you had your sword with
you when the cell teleported, the game "crashed" (computer jargon for
"stopped abruptly for no damn reason").
The problem was traced to the program that relates to the sword. As
every Zork player knows, the sword glows blue when danger is near. The
program accomplishes this by having the sword "look" behind each exit
in turn. If it sees trouble, it glows. When the cell teleported, the
sword tried to check all the exits and found two in the same direction
-- the original one leading north to the room with the DM (even though
that room was no longer there, the exit was still part of the cell),
and the new one leading north to the treasure. The program became
hopelessly confused and went into an infinite loop, crashing the game.
As a result of that crash (and others), Infocom developed an
exhaustive, three-phase testing process that takes four to five months
and involves, at different times, 35 to 40 people.
First comes "pre-alpha" testing. When a writer has completed the
skeleton of a game, it's informally checked to see that it has no
obvious defects and that the main line of the plot can be followed to
the end. If it passes, it's ready for "alpha."
A typical game goes into alpha having "on the order of 4,000 bugs,"
says tester Max Buxton. "Maybe 50 percent are spelling and punctuation
errors, extra spaces, missing blank lines, and so on. Maybe one
percent are crashes."
This certainly keeps Infocom's five full-time testers on their toes
during the two to three months it takes them, working separately, to
test a game. Tester Gary Brennan, 30, a former graduate student in
biochemistry at Harvard, delights in using his science background to
catch the writers in scientific flagrante delicto. "I try to make sure
that the sun is in the right position," he says, "or if you're in
outer space, that the sun and moon are where they're supposed to be --
stuff like that."
In Infidel, for example, the player finds a wooden beam that he
must take with him to solve a puzzle later on. "The beam is described
as being a certain length and width," Brennan says, "and I calculated
that it would have to weigh 500 pounds."
Alpha testers especially like what they call container bugs, the
first major example of which they found in Hitchhiker. Based on a
best-selling book, this wacky science-fiction comedy seems bent on
proving that anything is possible, even if it isn't. In the game,
reports 26 year-old Liz Cyr-Jones, who was an English and sociology
major in college and now is head of product testing, "there's a thing
your aunt gave you -- very small, but it can hold huge quantities. The
bug was, you could put the thing in the pocket of your robe, but if
you then took off your robe with the thing still in it and then put
the robe in the thing, you found you didn't have the thing anymore."
When the alpha testers have had their fun, the game goes back to
the writer for revisions. Then comes "beta," the month-long second
test phase, when for the first time people from outside the company
play the game. This is a constantly changing group of about 15 happily
unpaid Infocom fanatics who get free copies of the games and test them
for old and new bugs.
The third and final phase is "gamma" testing, which essentially
duplicates beta with a new group of about 15 eager volunteers.
Finally, when all the tests are done, the game is sent out for
duplicating and shipping to dealers. Even then, bugs are occasionally
discovered by the public, necessitating a new, corrected edition of
the game. "At least 20 versions of Zork have been shipped by now,"
says Meretzky.
Infocom has come a long way since its founders first encountered
that small brick building in Adventure. But along the way the company
has had its disappointments, especially Fooblitsky, its first (and
thus far only) game with graphics, and Cornerstone, its first (and
probably last) business product.
Fooblitzky, a multiplayer strategy board game that consists
entirely of graphics, was a very good, very amusing game, but it
didn't sell. Perhaps the major problem was that Infocom fans
apparently prefer solitaire games.
On the other hand, Cornerstone, a database manager software program
intended for large corporations, suffered, says Meretzky, because
"it's outside the mainstream of Infocom's focus, which is home
software."
Cornerstone cost so much time and money to develop that Infocom
found itself short of operating capital. "It was while we were looking
for additional funding," says Berez, "that the idea came up of merging
with Activision." The marriage was consummated in June 1986. Since
Activision intends to retain its hard-won position as a leading
publisher of entertainment software, Berez predicts that Infocom will
stay closer to home in the future.
"Our diversion into business software took our focus off the
entertainment line," he says. "Since we've decided that's really where
our future is, we can start moving in a lot of new directions in
entertainment software. I think you'll see much more diversity in
interactive fiction over the next few years." For Infocom, and its
games, the adventure continues.
---
Contributing Editor Burt Hochberg's favorite Infocom game is whichever
one he happens to be playing at the moment.
CAPTIONS:
Text appeal: Eye-catching packaging plays a key part in the
great popularity of the 27 games Infocom has produced so far.
Holding the enviable job of game tester is a crew hungry to catch
bugs (from left to right): Max Buxton, Tom Veldran, Liz Cyr-Jones,
Martin Price, Andrew Briggs, Gary Brennan, and Matt Hillman.
Steve Meretzky's own quest has taken him from constructing
buildings to constructing puzzles.
After a tough day on the terminal plotting adventure stories, the
writers relax by racing crabs: (from left to right) Stu Galley, Dave
Lebling, Brian Moriarty, Amy Briggs, Dave Anderson, and Jeff O'Neill.
Infocom founder and president Joel Berez has turned interactive
fiction into a profitable reality.
---
Box, page 17:
Whipping the Leather Goddesses
One of Infocom's most successful recent games is Steve Meretzky's
Leather Goddesses of Phobos (reviewed in GAMES, January 1987), a spoof
of 1930s-style pulp science fiction. What follows is an excerpt that
displays Infocom's characteristically irreverent wit and clever,
demanding puzzles. So as not to spoil the fun for any purchaser of the
game, the solution to the puzzle isn't in the Answer section; however,
the excerpt includes everything you need to know to solve it. The
player's typed commands are preceded by an arrow and are printed in
capital letters, and the computer's response follows each
command. -- B. H.
_You have been captured by the Leather Goddesses of Phobos, who want
to enslave all Earthmen. You manage to escape and now find yourself on
Mars standing before a castle, at the start of a quest for certain
items that will enable you to defeat the Leather Goddesses._
This ancient castle now lies in ruins. (It's no wonder this section of
Mars is considered the Ruined Castle Capital of the Solar System.) All
that remains of its once-proud ramparts are dust and rubble, and an
occasional stone block. A path leads away from the ruin to the west.
To the east: unchartable desert. Sitting on one of the stone blocks
is a large green frog. Something about it catches your eye.
> EXAMINE FROG
You realize what aroused your attention: the tiny gold crown on the
frog's head. The frog is otherwise totally ordinary. Ordinary for a
frog, that is. By any other measure it is a repulsive creature, with
swollen eyes, oozing warts, slimy skin, and a grating croak.
> TALK TO FROG
"Ribit."
> TAKE CROWN
It would take considerably more royal blood than you've got to wear
this royal crown.
> TAKE FROG
Think again, humanoid.
[Suddenly you have a brainstorm . . .]
> KISS FROG
You lean forward, but just as you are about to kiss the frog the sight
of its green warts and slimy skin make it impossible to continue.
> CLOSE EYES
Your eyes are now closed.
> KISS FROG
You lean forward with your eyes closed, but just as you are about to
kiss the frog the stench of old pond scum overwhelms you, and you
lurch back, retching.
> HOLD NOSE
You can't do that with your hands full!
> DROP ALL
clothes pin: Dropped.
stick of lip balm: Dropped.
wicker basket: Dropped.
flashlight: Dropped.
tray: Dropped.
> HOLD NOSE
Okay, you're now covering your nose with your hands.
> KISS FROG
You lean forward with your eyes closed and your nose shut, but just as
you are about to kiss the frog the creature lets loose a loud,
croaking "ribit." You admit that you are incapable of kissing under
such circumstances.
> TAKE CLOTHES PIN
You'll have to open your eyes first.
> OPEN EYES
You can once again sense with your eyes.
> TAKE CLOTHES PIN
You can't pick up anything while using your hands to cover your nose.
> LET GO OF NOSE
You can once again sense with your nose.
> TAKE CLOTHES PIN
Taken.
> PUT CLOTHES PIN ON NOSE
You pin your proboscis.
> CLOSE EYES
Your eyes are now closed.
> PUT HAND OVER EARS
Many sounds seem muffled now that you're covering your ears with your
hands.
> KISS FROG
You lean forward with your eyes closed, your nose shut, and your ears
covered, but just as you are about to kiss the frog the thought of
slimy frog lips pressing against your own makes you shudder away. . .
