*Mrs. Robner says she loved her murdered husband, but you know she is
lying. The proof is in the love note you just intercepted. Ask her
about the man who wrote it, and she says she never heard of him.
Confront her with his letter, and she changes her tune. "You have
certainly stooped to a new low, Inspector, opening other people's
mail!" Then she spills her story.*
Not all mysteries these days appear in paperbacks or movies. The tale
above scrolled up the screen of a personal computer. The story,
titled *Deadline,* is part of the latest craze in home computing:
programmed fiction. Machines that were used mainly for blasting aliens
and calculating monthly budgets are now also churning through
adventure tales and murder-mystery plots. "It's like reading a novel,
only you are the protagonist," says Science Fiction Writer Linda
Bushyager. While arcade-style games like Pac Man are losing
popularity, these complex programs are winning more and more fans.
In *Deadline,* one of ten computer "novels" produced by Infocom, a
Cambridge, Mass.-based software publishing house, the player is given
a casebook of evidence, a floppy disc containing the plot, and twelve
hours to unravel the mystery. If the murderer is not found in the
allotted time, a character named Chief Inspector Klutz takes the
player off the case. The program shuts down automatically and must be
replayed from the beginning.
As *Deadline* opens, a wealthy businessman has been found dead in the
library of his mansion from a mysterious drug overdose. The player,
who takes the role of inspector. has been called in to investigate. He
types commands into the computer, and the machine responds with
descriptions of people and places and snatches of dialogue that
develop the story. Suspects duck in and out of rooms; clues appear and
disappear; characters lie low or kill again, depending on the player's
actions. The story can unfold in literally thousands of ways. A
typical investigation, including starts and restarts, can run 40 hours
or longer. "It takes me three to six months to get completely through
one," says Craig Pearce, 31, a building manager from Berwyn, Ill.
"It's unbelievable how you can get hooked on these things."
The concept of interactive fiction is not totally new. The hit of the
Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal was an experimental movie
that let the audience vote on the course of the action. But it took
the computer, with its awesome power to store and sort text, to turn
the concept into a popular art form.
The first participatory computer tale, *Adventure,* was created in the
mid-1970s by computer researchers in Cambridge and Stanford. It
involved a treasure hunt through a labyrinth of caves and dungeons and
soon attracted a cult following. Miniature versions that ran on
microcomputers were available in the late 1970s.
There are now two types of interactive stories on the market:
high-resolution ones that display colorful pictures on the screen, and
text-only games that show just words. Judging from recent sales, the
text programs are more popular. *Deadline* (price: S49.95) has sold
more than 75,000 copies since it was released by Infocom almost two
years ago. The company's three-part fantasy adventure, *Zork,* is
doing even better. The first episode, *Zork I,* is the bestselling
piece of recreational computer software on the market, with sales of
250,000 copies. It is currently outpacing the home versions of such
arcade hits as Zaxxon and Frogger. "Whiz-bang graphics may be easier
to sell to the uninitiated, but they are being replaced by games that
give a sense of realism," says Marc Blank, the 29-year-old M.I.T.
alumnus who wrote *Deadline* and is co-author of *Zork.*
The key to interactive fiction is the parser, the part of the computer
program that interprets the player's commands. Parsers originally
accepted only one- and two-word commands ("Take sword, Kill troll"), a
most frustrating limitation. In 1977, a group of M.I.T. graduates,
including Blank, began working on more powerful parsers. Using
programming techniques developed at the university's
artificial-intelligence laboratory, they added adjectives,
prepositions and compound verbs, allowing such full sentences as "Pick
up the red bomb and put it in the mailbox" and "Where is the missing
will?"
Their first game, *Zork,* was developed on one of M.I.T.'s huge
mainframe computers. The next task was to squeeze the program down so
that it would run on a microcomputer with one-thousandth as much
processing power. Blank, who had been studying medicine when he helped
write *Zork,* did the necessary programming while serving his
internship.
With *Zork* and *Deadline* already big hits, newer and more colorful
computer novels are appearing on the software bestseller lists.
Stuart Galley, an Infocom programmer, has written a detective story,
*The Witness,* in the hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler.
*Infidel,* by Michael Berlyn, is an archaeological adventure set in
modern Egypt. *Planetfall,* by Steven Meretzky, is a science-fiction
comedy that co-stars a robot named Floyd.
By literary standards, Infocom's stories are crude. The characters are
two-dimensional, plots are forever clunking to a halt, and the writing
tends to be sophomoric. Perhaps the best computer thriller to date is
*Suspended,* also by Berlyn, a published author with several
science-fiction books to his credit. With computer novels selling
better than many hardcover books, it may not be long before the new
genre attracts an Isaac Asimov or a Stephen King.
-- By Philip Elmer-De Witt.
Reported by Jamie Murphy/Cambridge
CAPTION: Author Berlyn and Programmer Blank team up to play *Suspended*
CAPTION: Two hit novels: Infocom's *Deadline* mystery and *Zork* adventure
*"You have certainly stooped to a new low, Inspector."*
