<!--
	Title: They Take the High-Tech Road to Adventure
	Author: Burt Hochberg
	Source: Games, v11(5)
	Date: August/September 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<blockquote style="font-size: 1.25em; font-style:italic; margin-left: 23%;">
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 the software company that produces
some of today’s most innovative computer adventure games.
</blockquote>

"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.

<figure class="float-left">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/games-high-tech-road-to-adventure/game-boxes.jpg" alt="Infocom game boxes">
	<figcaption><strong>Text appeal: Eye-catching packaging plays a key part in
		the great popularity of the 27 games Infocom has produced so far.</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

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.

<figure style="max-width: 90%;">
	<img style="max-width: 100%;" src="/public/img/articles/games-high-tech-road-to-adventure/infocom-testers.jpg" alt="Infocom testers">
	<figcaption><strong>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.</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

"We fooled around for a while, thinking of various ideas," says Lebling,
the co-author (with Mare 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.

<figure class="float-right-wide">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/games-high-tech-road-to-adventure/infocom-writers.jpg" alt="Infocom writers">
	<figcaption><strong>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.</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

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."

<figure class="float-left-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/games-high-tech-road-to-adventure/steve-meretzky.jpg" alt="Steve Meretzky">
	<figcaption><strong>Steve Meretzky’s own
		quest has taken him from constructing
		buildings to constructing puzzles.</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

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 a
inseparably intertwined with the writing.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/games-high-tech-road-to-adventure/joel-berez.jpg" alt="Joel Berez">
	<figcaption><strong>Infocom founder and president Joel Berez
		has turned interactive fiction into a profitable reality.</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

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").

<div class="article-sidebar-dark float-left-wide">
<h2 class="center">Whipping the Leather Goddesses</h2>

One of Infocom's most successful recent games is Steve Metezky'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.
They player's typed commands are preceded by an arrow and are printed in
capital letters, and the computer's response follows each command.

*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.

&gt;EXAMINE FROG<br>
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.

&gt;TALK TO FROG<br>
"Ribit."

&gt;TAKE CROWN<br>
It would take considerably more royal blood than you've got to wear
this royal crown.

&gt;TAKE FROG<br>
Think again, humanoid.

[Suddenly, you have a brainstorm ...]

&gt;KISS FROG<br>
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.

&gt;CLOSE EYES<br>
Your eyes are now closed.

&gt;KISS FROG<br>
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.

&gt;HOLD NOSE<br>
You can't do that with your hands full!

&gt;DROP ALL<br>
clothes pin: Dropped.<br>
stick of lip balm: Dropped.<br>
wicker basket: Dropped.<br>
flashlight: Dropped.<br>
tray: Dropped.

&gt;HOLD NOSE<br>
Okay, you're now covering your nose with your hands.

&gt;KISS FROG<br>
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.

&gt;TAKE CLOTHES PIN<br>
You'll have to open your eyes first.

&gt;OPEN EYES<br>
You can once again sense with your eyes.

&gt;TAKE CLOTHES PIN<br>
You can't pick up anything while using your hands to cover your nose.

&gt;LET GO OF NOSE<br>
You can once again sense with your nose.

&gt;TAKE CLOTHES PIN<br>
Taken.

&gt;PUT CLOTHES PIN ON NOSE<br>
You pin your proboscis.

&gt;CLOSE EYES<br>
Your eyes are now closed.

&gt;PUT HANDS OVER EARS<br>
Many sounds seem muffled now that you're covering your ears with
your hands.

&gt;KISS FROG<br>
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...

</div>

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.

<hr>

*Contributing Editor Burt Hochberg’s favorite Infocom game is whichever one he happens to be
playing at the moment.*
