_Behind some of the most challenging computer games are minds
fascinated by the "real and kinda goofy."_
BY RICHARD DYER
It was about nine o'clock on a rainy night when I made the fatal
mistake. The doorbell rang. I saw a figure lurking outside. There was
a flash of light and an explosion. Mortal pain radiated from my heart,
blood flooded my lungs, a scream filled my brain. The last thing I saw
was the green screen of my Kaypro II computer, telling me all this was
my own fault, telling me what I should have done before it was too
late.
Actually it wasn't my fault; my assassin was the twisting
imagination of Stu Galley, creator of _The Witness_, the computer game
I was playing. Instead of being shipped off to the morgue, I could
pick my bloodied body up off the floor, go back outside the Linder
estate, begin at the beginning, and play through the story again,
pitting my wits for hours on end against the widowed Mr. Linder; his
daughter, the knockout heiress Monica; the sullen grifter Stiles,
lover of the late Mrs. Linder; the mysterious Oriental manservant
Phong. Not to mention Galley and his colleagues at Infocom, Inc., the
Cambridge company that thought up _The Witness_ and 10 other computer
games. Infocom's games dominate the lists of best-selling
recreational software and have pushed the company's annual sales to
more than $6 million in the less than five years of its existence.
_The Witness_ comes in a folder with a warning: "Somebody's
going to take the deep six. You've got a bird's-eye lowdown on the
caper . . . and 12 hours to crack the case." Inside is a police file
filled with information the player -- the detective, you -- might
need. There's a telegram from Mr. Linder urging you to come by.
There's a floor plan of his house. There's a copy of Mrs. Linder's
suicide note: "Tell your illustrious father how deeply I regret
soiling one of his precious revolvers." There is a matchbook with a
phone number scrawled inside, a pulpy _National Detective Gazette_,
and two pages of a newspaper from Santa Ana, California, dated
February 1, 1938. There, buried among the actual local news and human
interest stories of the day ("Man Works Many Years with Broken Neck"),
you will find a short column about the death of Mrs. Linder.
After you have studied these items, read the instructions, and
loaded up the disc drive of your computer, the story begins to print
out on the screen. "Storm clouds are swimming across the sky," the
computer tells you. "Your favorite pistol, a snub-nosed Colt .32, is
snug in its holster." You are the principal character in the story,
and at this moment your options open. The doorbell glows, "almost
daring you to ring it."
"Ring the doorbell," you type into your computer. Phong
answers the door. Soon enough, in the words of the package, "you're
left with a stiff and a race against the clock to nail your
suspect...."
With every question you ask, you get further entangled in webs
of motive and alibi, clues and red herrings, truth and lies. The
outcome of the story is affected by the decisions you make as you
interact with the characters, who have programmed minds and motives of
their own. Through the keyboard you can question them, follow them,
search them, accuse them, confront them, even smell them and rub them,
though they won't like that. The computer reprimands you when you have
succumbed to your baser impulses, when you try to kiss a suspect, when
you have "sunk to a new low." You can case the joint (under the bed
there may be clues, or only dust), test documents for fingerprints, or
send evidence to the lab for analysis.
There are also some things you can't do, or rather that the
game can't. It can "recognize" a vocabulary of up to 1000 words, but
if you are tempted to get into the 1930s mood of the thing and call
the snub-nosed Colt a "piece," the computer won't know what you are
talking about. The machine constantly tells you that you can't ask
questions like that, that it doesn't know the word you're using, that
you don't need to do certain things to solve the mystery. The problems
of solving the case have a certain logical complexity, but the
simplicity of the tools available for sorting through the problems
makes the game still more complicated and confusing. The situations
engage your full problem-solving imagination, but you must exercise it
in the vocabulary of Dick and Jane; it sometimes seems as if Puff and
Spot could sniff out the clues faster.
But the process soon gets to be interactively addictive. You
learn the rules of the game. (After all, you play tennis with a court
and a net that interfere with your freedom of movement.) And, as one
Infocom staffer puts it, "You'd pay a lot more to play this game with
a _live_ storyteller." It can take weeks to work through to the end of
an Infocom "participatory novel"; 30 hours' playing time is a good
average. The wife of one "detective" pulled the diskette out of the
family computer and threw it into the fireplace to get her husband's
attention. Astronaut Sally Ride told _People_ magazine that _Zork_,
Infocom's first game, a fantasy adventure, was driving her to her
knees. Playing one Infocom game almost invariably leads to another
($39.95 to $69.95 apiece in computer stores, hobby shops, department
stores, bookstores, and, of course, by mail), which is precisely what
the company intends to have happen. "This business began as a lark,"
says staff writer Dave Lebling, "and it is looking less larky every
day. We are taking serious money in, and we are putting serious money
out. All to make games."
Infocom was founded just under five years ago by eight young men at
MIT who kicked a few hundred dollars each into their new company,
which operated out of a post-office box in Kendall Square. Today there
are 50 full-time employees, a bulletin board full of job postings, and
the regular annexing of additional carpeted acreage in a high-tech
office building hidden behind the filling stations and shopping malls
off Route 2. The decal on the door proclaims "Imagination Sold and
Serviced Here." The electric bill for just the mighty DEC 2060
computer that blinks and hums away in the basement runs to $1500 a
month, "about what it would be," says vice president Marc Blank, "if
you lived in Buckingham Palace, or if you were running an aluminum
smelter."
At the beginning Infocom had one concrete asset, _Zork_, a
game that a few hackers, or computer nuts, had developed in their
spare time in MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. The hackers also
had their own apparently limitless energies and imaginations. They had
written _Zork_ -- in computerese, they had "implemented" it -- for the
fun of doing it, and without any thought of the game's commercial
potential. For one thing, there weren't any commercial possibilities
in 1977, before the explosion of the home computer market.
The ancestor of _Zork_ was a game called _Adventure_, which
was implemented by staffers and students in the Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. _Adventure_ is a
Dungeons & Dragons-type story; the player participates by typing into
the computer simple two-word commands like "Go North" and "Hit Troll."
Blank, Lebling, and Tim Anderson were working in MIT's Laboratory for
Computer Science when _Adventure_ arrived.
"For a couple of weeks, dozens of people were playing the game
and feeding each other clues," Lebling recalls. "Everyone was asking
you in the hallway if you had gotten past the snake yet."
But several players who had begun the game with excitement
finished with irritation. They wanted something else to play, and
there wasn't anything else. "It was like reading a Sherlock Holmes
story, and you wanted to read another one of them immediately," one of
the players says. "Only there wasn't one, because nobody had written
it." The people at the MIT lab also thought they could do better, so
between the spring of 1977 and the end of 1978, they set to work
constructing _Zork_.
MIT did not officially object, because no one officially asked
for permission to work on _Zork_. "The attitude was that as long as
nothing was stopping people from being productive, it was good for
morale, as long as people did it on their own time," Blank says. "The
game was always restricted from use during regular working hours."
Doing better involved developing a more sophisticated way for
the player to communicate with the computer. "When you can play with
only two words," Blank explains, "it's clumsy. You are limited in the
stories and types of problems you can come up with. Necessity was the
mother of invention; we wanted to put adjectives and prepositions into
the parser, which is the part of the game through which the player
communicates with the game's environment. Each new addition we made to
_Zork_ required an enhancement of the parser."
How the parser works, let alone how anyone would set about
"enhancing" it, is not a subject the people from Infocom discuss in
public. The parser is a part of the company's proprietary technology
that keeps it ahead of the competition in an industry in which the
concept of copyright doesn't protect very much. All anyone will say
just goes to make alphabet soup. The games are based on a new computer
language known as ZIL ("Zork Interactive Language"), which is
apparently a cousin to a "machine-independent" language that Blank was
developing at MIT called MDL (or "Muddle"). MDL itself is a descendant
of another computer language called LISP (from list processing). Talk
about muddle.
The important thing is that _Zork_ became an immediate hit at
MIT and at computer labs around the country -- anywhere there was a
machine with a million bytes of memory to work from and a roomful of
cyborgs eager to play. In its sophistication, _Zork_ bore about the
same relationship to _Adventure_ as the splashiest arcade games do to
the little white light that bounced through the primitive _Pong._
By 1979, home computers had became a major marketplace
reality, so Blank and his colleagues began to consider the problem of
crunching their game down to the size a household machine could handle
and the related problem of how to make it play on different and
incompatible brands of computers. The solutions they came up with
became Infocom's second proprietary technology. Each game is currently
available in versions fitted to the machines of 18 different
manufacturers, with a couple more in the wings.
In the beginning, hardly anyone worked full-time for the new
company. Blank, for example, was still finishing up his medical
training at the Albert Einstein Medical School in New York; the others
were still in various degree programs at MIT. The atmosphere
surrounding Infocom's activities was informal; implementers asked
their roommates to test the new games, and the roommates in turn
became fired with the desire to write their own. Yet at the same time,
the management and marketing team was always aggressively and
thoroughly professional.
Today the chairman of the board is Albert Vezza, a senior
scientist at MIT who developed the US Postal Service's electronic mail
system and taught many of Infocom's wunderkinder. The president of the
company is Joel Berez, who has degrees in both computer science and
management. He was instrumental in tying Infocom to its first
distributor, which dropped _Zork_ as incompatible with its
businesslike image, and subsequently in developing the company into a
full-scale independent operation.
Now Infocom has 11 games on the market, with a twelfth
scheduled for immediate release. The games fall into several
categories, which parallel the genres of popular fiction. _Enchanter_
and _Sorcerer_ ("Gaze now into the amulet of Aggthora and let be
revealed the one valorous enough to rescue the land and earn the title
of Sorcerer") are in the fantasy tradition of _Zork_; so, not
surprisingly, are _Zork II_ and _Zork III_. In addition to _The
Witness_, there is another mystery called _Deadline_, in which
Inspector Klutz takes you off the case if you haven't solved it within
12 hours. _Infidel_ is the first of a projected series called "Tales
of Adventure." It takes place around and in a pyramid in Egypt in the
1920s, and it was developed with the aid of a Harvard pyramid
specialist. There are three science-fiction titles: _Suspended_,
reputedly the most challenging of the Infocom games to play,
_Starcross_, and _Planetfall_, which features Floyd, the most popular
Infocom character, a robot "with the mentality of an encyclopedia and
the maturity of a 9-year-old." Infocom people smile knowingly when you
ask them about the possibility of Westerns or spy stories. They joke
about the idea of a romance series; somehow the moves don't seem
appropriate to a computer keyboard. "We haven't had a flop yet," says
Linda Lawrence, who until last month was the company's marketing
communications coordinator. "It will not be a fun day if anything ever
does."
So far these games are the work of five staff writers. The rest of the
company works on testing, research and development, product support,
and marketing. The writers share an obvious technical competence and
familiarity with the artifacts of pop culture. "There was a time when
I had read every science-fiction book," one writer says, "but now I
read only the good ones." Otherwise they are as different from one
another as the games they have invented.
Bruce Schechter, 29, is probably in the best position to tell
you what it's like to start from the beginning, because he's the new
kid on the block, and he just started working for the company as
Infocom's sixth staff writer. Schechter earned his Ph.D. in physics
but found he liked writing better. He was working as a science feature
writer for _Discover_ magazine when a colleague there wrote an article
about Infocom. Schechter decided the company sounded like his kind of
place. "The night before my interview I stayed up until two in the
morning to finish _Deadline_," he recalls. "After I got the job, the
first thing I had to do was learn the fundamentals of the language
ZIL. Then I made a miniature game. It had five rooms, one madman, and
one banana -- and the goal of the game was to make him slip on the
peel. Now I am working on the first little tiny corner of my new game,
which I'm setting in a railroad car. It's almost like a character,
because of all the things I have to think about. If there's a window,
then I have to know what would happen if someone decides to look
through it. If there are curtains, they must open and shut -- I have
to consider what the reasonable consequences of that might be. The
other guys can finish a game in about nine months, but at this point,"
be says, his voice trailing off in perplexity, "the whole notion of
finishing...."
High-strung, chain-smoking Michael Berlyn, 34, the inventor of
_Suspended_ and _Infidel_, was the first game writer not drawn from
the original MIT inner circle. He came to Infocom from the worlds of
rock music and popular fiction; framed covers from his paperback books
(_Crystal Phoenix_ and _Integrated Man_) hang on the wall, and a
series of Tom Swift, Jr., books is stacked on his office bookshelf.
The name of the Colorado company he founded before he came to Infocom
tells you something about his sense of humor: Sentient Software.
Berlyn says he can describe the difference between writing a
paperback original and an Infocom game only in terms of an analogy: "A
bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one
sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing
alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres --
mystery, fantasy, science fiction -- and in another we are still
teaching ourselves, laying out the groundwork for what these things
could be. For the most part, we are working without pioneers. In our
own way we are like Louis L'Amour or Agatha Christie or Dashiell
Hammett.
"The experience of playing one of the games," Berlyn says, "is
the same as when you read a good book or see a brilliant movie -- _you
are there_. Most fiction manipulates you; it is a passive experience.
With these games we go one step further: The games do manipulate you,
but at the same time you are having an _active_ experience, and you
exert control over your environment. How much? At this point I'd say
that you have more control than you'd think, and less than we'd like."
Cheerful Dave Lebling, 34, one of the creators of _Zork_, went
on to write a science-fiction adventure called _Starcross_ and is now
working on a new mystery game. Unlike his colleagues, he has retained
his affiliation with MIT and works for Infocom only part-time. "The
way we start here is to write up a treatment, a 10- to 20-page plot
outline with events and characters. Then we show it around and work
cooperatively. So far there is no game that is 100 percent the work of
one person. It is very useful to have people around to say, 'That's
_terrible_.' We begin with plot ideas and then express them in the
vocabulary of the system -- rooms, objects, and directions. The way we
work here is to see a limitation and then see what we can do to get
around it. At this point we are up against a wall: the size of home
computers and how much information they can handle. Within that
limitation our direction has gone from treasure-hunting to
problem-solving, from an exercise in computer programming into
something very like real fiction, with mysteries, characters, and what
Alfred Hitchcock called 'McGuffins.' Right now I am working on a new
mystery with more than a dozen suspects -- the plot is like a vat of
eels, _wriggling_."
Tall, shambling Steve Meretzky, 27, is the creator of
_Planetfall_ and _Sorcerer_, and he is the author of three _Zork_
paperback book spinoffs. "I started by play-testing games before they
were released -- that's when Infocom had two full-time employees and
worked out of an 8-by-10 office in Faneuil Hall. I'd play the games on
the Apple at home and report bugs," Meretzky says, "and before long I
was itching to write my own game. I'd read science fiction all my
life, so it was only natural that I'd come up with something like
_Planetfall_. Right now I'm about to start something new -- a
collaboration with a well-known science-fiction writer, adapting a
book of his into a game. Our immediate goal is to add vocabulary, more
text, a bigger geography, more objects. The system is so flexible and
powerful that you can do most of what you want to do, if you are
willing to take the time. I have no vision of where it all might lead,
but I can imagine adding pictures and then sound, even smell and
touch, eventually. Just like in a dream, only real."
My own nemesis, the creator of _The Witness_, is bearded, professorial
Stu Galley, 39, who came to the game-writing process a bit more
reluctantly than the others. At CalTech and MIT he resisted learning
about computers: "I wondered what they could do that would be more
interesting than number-crunching." He thought _Zork_ was okay, but he
wasn't particularly interested in fantasy. But Marc Blank's mystery
_Deadline_ hooked him; he planned _The Witness_ as a kind of
complement. _Deadline_ is set in the East, on a summer day; _The
Witness_ is set at night, on the West Coast. "It was my idea to make
it a period piece," says Galley. "I got a Sears catalogue from the
1930s, and that is how I furnished Mr. Linder's house. I looked up
expressions in dictionaries of slang like _I Hear America Speaking_. I
even got ahold of the _Los Angeles Times_ for the day the story takes
place; if you decide to turn the radio on during the game, it will be
playing exactly what the radio was playing at that time of day. That's
what appeals to me -- it's all real, and kinda goofy."
Despite his good humor in talking about _The Witness_, now
agreeably in his past, Galley doesn't look like a happy man. He is in
the terminal stages of what everyone says is the least favorite part
of the game-building operation -- the final debugging of a new one.
Staffers at Infocom are paid to beat up on the games, and there are
outside testers as well. Solving every problem that a player turns up
has a way of creating a chain reaction of whole new problems. "Right
now," Galley says, "I am not enjoying this at all. But you should also
say that this new game, _Seastalker_, may be the best thing we've ever
done. It's our first juvenile, planned for kids 9 and up. The story is
about a famous young inventor like Tom Swift." _Seastalker_ is a
collaborative venture with a man named Jim Lawrence, who has written a
number of "Hardy Boys" and "Tom Swift" books.
Blank, who was only 22 when he helped create _Zork_ and who is
now 29, went on to collaborate with Lebling on the other parts of the
_Zork_ trilogy, _Zork II_ and _Zork III_, and to develop "our first
game that wasn't a _Zork_ -- _Deadline_." Tall, thin, and sharp as a
razor even after a red-eye express flight from the West Coast, Blank's
wide-ranging talk indicates that he never was exclusively interested
in games -- his M.D. degree hangs on the wall, together with a Phi
Beta Kappa certificate and a Tanglewood poster. He describes his
present job as a "mishmosh" of programming and design, supervisory
work, and the devising of corporate strategy. "Sometimes it seems that
all I do is interviews anymore," he says, sighing. Infocom has
research divisions now, but what it is up to is none of an
interviewer's business -- part of it has to do with computer graphics,
part with business software, and some of it with theoretical
explorations that could underpin all the Infocom products and
projects.
Like Berlyn, Blank enjoys the swaggering pioneer aspect of
Infocom. "It's not as if other people were doing what we do," Blank
says, "and we were making me-too products. Of course, the games are in
one sense primitive -- they depend on a primitive technology that will
certainly advance. Right now we are hampered by the capacities of home
computers. But who knows, in five years they may squeeze the
equivalent of our main frame computer onto a chip that costs 100
bucks. In the meantime, we can have only about 25,000 words of text --
about the length of a novella. But no player would ever see all of it
on one pass. A lot of the text is there to take care of unusual moves
on the player's part -- it's there for the wrong turns. If you were to
look at the best solution (and many of the games have more than 20
possible endings) and took the quickest possible way, the text might
be only a few thousand words. The challenge, for us, is to come up
with a story whose plot has a lot of stretch in it. You can't think of
it in terms of writing a linear story. You write it from the end
backwards, putting in branches; if the player does certain things,
then other things will happen later."
Each game has added complexity to its predecessors, but Blank
doesn't think of them as superseding one another. He does admit that
the company goes back to earlier games to correct the problems that
players have found in them -- _Zork_ is now in its seventy-fifth
version. But the company hasn't yet rewritten any actual game problem
in light of subsequent developments in technology. "You can't change
_Zork_," says Lawrence. "After all," she says, clearly horrified by
the thought, "it's _historic_."
Blank emphasizes that each game stands on its own, and that
each fulfills the criteria of _any_ successful game -- including those
played with cards or on a board: "We like to judge ourselves by the
classic games, the really good ones like Monopoly or Risk. A game
should be interesting and fair; it should have feedback, so you have a
way of knowing whether you are doing well. It should have replay
value, so it is fun the second, third, and tenth time that you play
it. Our games should serve the same function as any entertainment does
-- provide diversion for people that could use some. I think our games
are _good_ entertainment because they are not mindless; they are
mind-exercising entertainment. They are not intended to be educational
or spiritually uplifting; they are intended to be fun."
Obviously, thousands of people have found that the Infocom games are
fun. More than 130,000 copies of _Zork_ have been sold, and the three
_Zork_ games together have sold more than a quarter-million copies --
more than the home versions of arcade games like _Lode Runner_ and
_Zaxxon_, which both depend on graphics. Infocom takes a lofty view of
its independence from graphics; its publicity stresses that the human
imagination, awakened by the games, "makes any picture that's ever
come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison."
Michael Dornbrook, Infocom's product manager, says that there
are now 1.8 million computers in American homes, and the evidence is
that the company has penetrated into half a million of those homes.
"Our joke," he says, "is that we have penetrated them all, if you
count the pirated games."
Statistical studies show that adults play the games (75
percent of the players are over age 25), that most of the players are
heavy readers, and that 80 percent of players are men. "We have a much
stronger base among females than other computer software and than
computer magazines, but it is still an area we want to work on,"
Dornbrook says. "The mysteries are more popular with women than the
science-fiction games. We don't know what the results of a Western or
an espionage game might be because we don't have them." He points out
that the company is very sensitive to the concerns of the people who
play the games: One ending of _Infidel_ was altered because early
players felt that it unfairly rewarded an ethnic bias.
The fast-talking Dornbrook, 30, came into the company as a
game tester. "Before _Zork_, computer games seemed frivolous to me. It
took the whole huge system at MIT to run something like _Pong_; the
joystick hadn't even been invented yet. I played _Zork_ and fell in
love with it immediately, but I didn't tell anyone that because I
wanted them to keep on paying me to play it. After a while they
started passing on to me letters begging for help. I got $2 for every
question I answered. I developed a map for _Zork_ and founded the Zork
Users Group, which I ran out of my apartment through the mail. By the
time that was absorbed by Infocom, about a year ago, there were 20,000
members, and four employees were filling 1000 orders a week for the
game, the T-shirts, and the 'I'd Rather Be Zorking' bumper stickers."
Dornbrook has been very active in product development and
support. Elaborate packaging, like that for _The Witness_, has turned
out to be very helpful to the game writers. To begin with, it means
every piece of information doesn't have to be in the computer system
itself. Some of the who, what, where, when, and why can be on paper,
leaving the computer free to deal with what Lawrence calls the
"worms."
All the package items -- the matchbook, the map, the telegram
in _The Witness_ -- become part of the fun of the game as well. They
have had the unexpected and beneficial side effect of discouraging
piracy. Since Infocom caught on to this, it has done its part to keep
it going: The package items, designed by Giardini/Russell in
Watertown, are printed in peculiar colors and on oddly folded paper,
so anyone who wants to photocopy them has a problem.
One of Dornbrook's most popular innovations has been the
development of hint books for each of the games. These provide leading
questions for a player to ask during the progress of a game, with
answers of increasing suggestivity that are printed as "InvisiClues,"
which you can read only by drawing a special chemical pen over them.
"I spent two months calling all over the country trying to find
invisible ink," he says. "I called publishers and printing magazines
and every other place you could think of before I finally went back to
A. B. Dick, which is where I started. They didn't know what I was
talking about until I finally said something that clicked. 'Oh, you
mean our _latent image_ process.' I still don't know what it is,
except that it is citrus-activated and nontoxic and that your kid
could eat the marker without killing himself." As Dornbrook speaks, a
message blinks behind him on his computer screen. It says, "Plug that
Prose."
The glassy offices of Infocom look like a high-tech company, but the
atmosphere is more what you would expect in a college dormitory.
There is even a _Casablanca_ poster in the back of Meretzky's
aquarium. The staff dresses casually, and it appears as if some of
them have slept in their clothes, if they have slept at all; they
cultivate an image at once laid back and hassled, as many
undergraduates do. They pop in and out of one another's offices and
moan over game problems as if the solutions were an overdue term
paper, and they had just pulled an all-nighter.
When you get Infocom employees together there is frequent
hilarity, but you can tell they are on their guard because there's a
stranger around. There are things they can't talk about for
competitive reasons, and they can make quite a condescending show of
explaining things to an outsider. At the same time, any outsider would
immediately get a sense of how Infocom is a community effort, of how
the personalities complement one another, of how much fun they find in
their work -- the same fun that makes the games so compulsively
playable. Over pizza and soft drinks incongruously served on a
boardroom table, the group put on quite a performance.
Question: "Where does the name _Zork_ come from?"
"It's my middle name," says Blank. "It's my maiden name," says
Berlyn. "Marc ate three pizzas all by himself, and when he stood up he
belched, 'Zork,'" says Meretzky, belching.
"Actually," says Blank, calming down, "it's just a nonsense
word. There are all kinds of words like that that hackers tend to use
-- words like 'frob.' Frob means thingamajig, and it can be used as
any part of speech. It's a generic noun and verb. Cars are full of
frobs that get frobbed. That's why we named the wizard in _Zork II_
the Wizard of Frobozz. He's forgotten all his spells, except for the
ones that begin with the letter _F_."
Question: "Why is it all of you find debugging the most
unpleasant part of implementing a game?"
"The major feeling of debugging," says Berlyn, "is not one of
creativity. These are the most complex game applications around, and
as such they are interdependent, like a house of cards. I don't mean
that they are unstable, but they _are_ interdependent. If you want to
turn around one of the cards, you have to do it _very_ carefully."
"Actually," says Meretzky, "the first part of debugging is
exciting; it's the first feedback. Somebody is actually playing _your_
game. But by the end, you get sick of the little problems. You have
spent three months inventing the game, and now you have to spend just
as much time cleaning it up. The worst bug that ever got out was in
_Zork III_: it actually prevented you from finishing the game. The
last problem puts you in a prison cell, and you have to tell the
dungeon master, several rooms away, to push a button on a control
panel in order to go into the next room, where you will win the
treasure of Zork, Fame, and Fortune. If you still had your sword with
you, the game would simply crash. We call things like that our 'fatal
errors'; we caught that one relatively early on."
"We shouldn't call them fatal errors," says Berlyn. "There's
no gross damage done. If you buy a washing machine, bring it home,
plug it in, put your clothes in, and the sucker blows up, you're
looking at flood damage, short circuits, possible electrocution ...
and mangled wash. If you hit a bug in one of our games, all it leads
to is progressive dementia."
Question: "How long have you had your own computer?"
"Santa dropped it off at Christmas in 1982," Blank says.
"Before that we rented time from Digital. It was pretty slow."
"Y-y-y-e-s-s-s," drawls Berlyn, sounding just like Hal the
computer in Stanley Kubrick's film _2001: A Space Odyssey_.
Question: "What sorts of research have gone into the games,
apart from what was playing on the radio in Los Angeles on February 1,
1938?"
"Everything in these invented worlds is consistent," says
Blank "In the science-fiction stories everything is consistent with
scientific laws."
"Floyd, the robot in _Planetfall_, was the result of research
into how an artificially intelligent mind might work," says Meretzky.
"For _Infidel_ we hired a pyramid specialist," says Berlyn.
"It was a mummy."
Question: "What famous people apart from Sally Ride play
Infocom games?"
"That's hard to answer," says Lawrence. "Famous people don't
ordinarily bring up the games they play in interviews unless you ask
them to." But the others supply the names of a couple of Infocom fans
-- John Gardner, the novelist who is continuing Ian Fleming's James
Bond series, and Douglas Adams, the author of the _Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy_.
"And don't forget Timothy Leary," says Berlyn. "He certainly
understood the fractured reality concept of _Suspended_. I couldn't
rip him away from the machine, and all he had to say was, 'And this is
_legal_?'"
