Across America tonight, computer-game players will slip floppy discs
into their machines, and their screens will fill with ... *words.* Not
jerky bits-and-bytes stick figures. Just words, firing imaginations to
flight -- to the Great Underground Empire, where Lord Dimwit Flathead
once ruled; to a dead planet where a galactic plague has wiped out
every living thing, except a robot named Floyd; to an Egyptian temple
deep below the burning desert. The front-office glass at Infocom in
Cambridge, Mass., where these programs are written, bears a sticker
reading "Imagination sold and serviced here."
With 18 games on the market and four on this week's authoritative
Softsel Hot List -- including Zork I, now marking its 169th week in
the Top 20 -- Infocom is an industry leader in the text-only branch of
computer gaming called "interactive fiction." The player is the
central character in each story, and to a large extent determines how
the action unfolds. At the start of Zork I, for example, you are in a
field near a house. What next? Choose your own path. You may want to
explore a bit first ("Go east," "Climb the tree") or go straight into
the house ("Open the window," "Enter the house"). After each move the
game answers back with a detailed explanation of where you are and
what you can "see." Over the next few days or weeks (play time per
game can run to 100 hours ) you'll explore a vast underground cavern,
solving puzzles and accumulating booty along the way -- and trying to
avoid electronic death.
There are others writing and distributing interactive fiction. Simon
and Schuster recently issued a game based on "Star Trek"; Adventure,
widely considered the seminal work in the field, has slipped into the
public domain and can be played on The Source data base, an electronic
information service available to home-computer owners. But Infocom is
the class of the field. Its games are cleverly written, beautifully
packaged and punctuated with a sharp sense of humor. In fact, it was
frustration over the primitive, stodgy Adventure that got the company
started. In 1977 a group of MIT computer jockeys got the idea of
trying to go Adventure one better. Over the next few years, recalls
Joel Berez, now 31 and Infocom's president, Zork was their "midnight
project."
The result was an instant hit on the MIT campus -- and, via the
Arpanet data base, across the country. It was clearer and funnier than
Adventure -- when a frustrated player types in any of several
well-known obscenities, for example, the game responds, "Such language
in a high-class establishment like this!" And its breakthrough
programming enabled plavers for the first time to enter complicated
commands in plain English ("Climb down the cliff and jump into the
river"). The group founded Infocom in 1979, thinking they'd issue the
game commercially and score some fast money to bankroll business
software.
*Losing sleep:* It was six years before the company finally introduced
Cornerstone, software to help nonprogrammers organize business
information quickly and easily. In the meantime, the games simply took
over. Zork begat Zorks II and III, then mystery games, science-fiction
games and Tales of Adventure, each selling for between $35 and $50. A
stable of in-house writers grew; today there are six. A devoted cult
following grew, too -- mostly male, a third of them teenagers, another
third in their 30s. The seductive power of Infocom began to spread.
People began to lose sleep. Conversations like this were overheard
among computer owners: "I went to the garden and got the key. Then I
went to the Carousel Room, and southwest to the Cobwebby Corridor.
But I couldn't get past the lizard and unlock the door. What do I do
now?" Says Berez, "We originally thought these games would just appeal
to cultists, fanatics. That was true. But the cult following got a
whole lot larger than we expected." Last year sales topped $10
million.
This fall the company introduced the first in its Interactive Fiction
Plus series, A Mind Forever Voyaging. Plus games require 128K of
memory, twice that necessary for regular Infocom games; that limits
the potential audience somewhat, but gives the writers twice as broad
a canvas on which to work. In AMFV, writer Steve Meretzky has used the
expanded memory to breathtaking effect, creating a richly imagined
anti-Utopian futureworld. "I wanted to do something that was more of a
story and less of a puzzle," says Meretzky. "And I wanted to make a
political statement, which hadn't been done in this medium before." To
a very large degree, he succeeded. AMFV isn't "1984," but in some ways
it's even scarier. Players wander the streets of a South Dakota town
in the year 2041, not really sure what they'll find or why they are
there. And then . . . well, have fun. But don't mess with the Border
Security Force. And be sure to get home before dark.
BILL BAROL
CAPTION: Playing out fantasies: *Adventure by Infocom*
