<!--
	Title: Meet "Hollywood" Dave Anderson
	Source: Computer Entertainment, v5(12)
	Date: March 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

Recently we had the opportunity to chat with "Hollywood" Dave Anderson, author of
HOLLYWOOD HIJINX. He started as a tester and then moved on to manager of testing
and finally to author with this, his first piece of interactive fiction. Instantly
recognizable in his flamboyant Hawaiian floral shirt, Dave is a native Californian who
was on home ground for the occasion of an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds" in Los
Angeles. (The Marathon is a competition among teams of high school students who
work straight through the night attempting to solve an unreleased Infocom game.
In next month's issue we'll take you to the scene of the Marathon of the Minds for
"Bureaucracy," which was held February 28 to March 1 in Los Angeles.)

*CE:* Where did the idea for HOLLYWOOD HIJINX come from?

*Dave:* Way back in high school, I used to write sort of joke movie reviews, based on
take-offs of titles of current movies. I was looking for some kind of a pull, some
kind of frosting for this tory. I had all the puzzles, but I wanted an excuse to be funny.
So I went through several things. First Uncle Buddy was going to be a magician, and you
were going to go around finding all the props to his various magic tricks. But I thought,
"there are not a lot of jokes in that, and I've already got a lot of puzzles." Then Aunt
Hildegarde was going to be a typical tabloid reader. She would be into the occult and into
weird diets, and things like that. But it was too far-flung and I really couldn't get a lot of
jokes out of it, so I thought, "what about the movie thing?" Since I used to write these
things, I thought that maybe the movie angle would be good, so I came up with Uncle
Buddy being a "B" movie producer.

<figure class="float-right-half">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/ce-meet-hollywood-dave-anderson/dave-anderson.jpg" alt="Computer Entertainment editor with Dave Anderson">
	<figcaption class="center" style="font-style: italic;">CE Editor with "Hollywood" Dave Anderson</figcaption>
</figure>	

*CE:* And since you're from L.A., that would seem like a natural, especially when it comes
to the publicity for the game. And speaking of publicity, I understand from the press
release that your office at Infocom is papered with beach posters.

*Dave:* I have a mural on one whole wall that's a beach scene.

*CE:* That's for real?

*Dave:* Oh yes.

*CE:* You're living the part.

*Dave:* Right there on the beach.

*CE:* So you are the token odd-ball Californian in the stately halls of Cambridge?

*Dave:* There are other Californians, but they've pretty much adopted the East Coast
lifestyle. I still wear Hawaiian shirts, and when it snows I wear shorts, just to keep
everyone on time. One day last winter, I didn't know it was snowing, and I came to work
in long pants. And everyone said, "Dave, it's snowing. How come you're not wearing
shorts?"

*CE:* Tell me about the hedge maze in HOLLYWOOD HIJINX. If I'm to believe what I read
about it, you constructed the model out of paper clips.

*Dave:* Right. I drew a huge grid on a large sheet of graph paper, and then I took 700
jumbo paper clips and worked with that, moved them around. I read a few magazines
trying to learn what makes a maze. I played with it about a week, and then when we
transferred it down to the \[8-bit\]  Atari, which is the smallest width screen, it turned out it
was too big, so I had to redo it. I think I ended up redoing it twice.

*CE:* I noticed that what seemed to be a map that I found early in the game seemed to be
rather long and narrow on my 80-column Apple screen. Even with it I managed to get
hopelessly lost the first time I went into the hedge-maze.

*Dave:* That's only half of the map. One half has vertical lines, and the other has horizontal.
When you put one on top of the other you get a whole map of the maze.

*CE:* Well, I assumed there was something important in that maze, since there's an "X
marks the spot" right in the center of the map -- unless of
course it's a red herring, and a red herring would not be an
unexpected thing in an Infocom game.

*Dave:* I wouldn't do that. Steve Meretzky \["Leather Goddesses
of Phobos," "A Mind Forever Voyaging"\] would do that. I
would never put in a red herring. Everything's in there for a
purpose -- well I shouldn't say everything. There's a bath mat I
put in just for a joke.

*CE:* I understand that some responses to unusual actions taken
by a player in an Infocom game come out of the Beta testing.

*Dave:* Right. In this game, one of the treasures is the lost
film, "A Corpse Line." One of the testers suggested that when
you show the film, you should die also, like Uncle Buddy. So
you're able to put on the film reel and watch it. It says when
you walk into the projection room that this is Uncle Buddy's
screening room and he died here while watching a copy of "A
Corpse Line." It has disappeared and no one has ever seen it
since. So then when you show it, the same thing happens to
you, and it gives a description of how bad the movie was.

*CE:* Well, you certainly never get to inherit the house that
way!

*Dave:* There's a lot of gags like that in our games where you'll
die or something unfortunate will happen to you just when you
try something wacky.

*CE:* Well, that's what "saves" are for.

*Dave:* Right.

*CE:* I know you've had some "Marathons of the Mind" that
have worked with HOLLYWOOD HIJINX. How many did you have?

*Dave:* The last one -- well, we tried to make it a little easier
with a hint in the game because nobody was getting into the
house in the beginning. There's also a puzzle with a leaky
bucket that no one was figuring out, so we moved it and sort
of start the puzzle for you. In the game, though, you can go
around and do almost any puzzle independently of the other
puzzles. It's not really linear. The time, I guess at Pittsburgh,
which was after we had watered it down some, trying to make
it a little more accessible because it was really too hard, I
think we started at 7 p.m. A team finished, I think at 7:30 the
next morning. So it was twelve-and-a-half hours, but we had
taken a couple of breaks, so it was probably something closer
to nine hours.

*CE:* This is with three kids working together, of course, and I
think that it is easier when you have several people working
together.

*Dave:* Oh sure, you get on a roll and you just keep going.

*CE:* It seems that a Marathon of the Minds can be almost
another form of Beta testing because you do make some
changes in the program.

*Dave:* On HOLLYWOOD HIJINX we were having marathons
very early, but sometimes the program is already in
duplication when we're having marathons, so no changes are
made.

*CE:* How does the timing usually work on a new game, from
beginning through beta testing to the point when it's on store
shelves?

*Dave:* It usually takes anywhere from nine months to a year to
do a game. For the first four or five months, you're just
writing and putting it all together. Then it goes into alpha
testing. Depending on the author, that can be anywhere from
four weeks to ten weeks. In alpha testing, it's really up for
grabs whether a puzzle should stay or not, or whether it's too
hard or too easy.

*CE:* Is alpha testing done inside or outside Infocom?

*Dave:* Alpha testing is done inside. And the various testers see
it one at a time, sort of stretched out, so that everyone sees it
fresh and not everyone see sit at the same time or at the same
stage. They can't see how it evolves or how the changes are
affecting it. So that goes on for four to ten weeks. Then, once
we feel it's ready, it goes to beta testing, which is where we
mail it out to different testers we keep a list of -- people who
have written in about bugs, or some people we've found at
marathons. That usually lasts four to five weeks. And in the
meantime, the author is still working on the game and fixing
the bugs. Once it's in beta, it's more or less set. The storyline
is there, and the puzzles, and so forth, unless they turn out to
be too hard to too easy. When the beta reports come back, it's
about a week, and we make all the corrections. Then it goes to
gamma testing. Now in theory, gamma means the game is
finished, but it never works that way. In gamma, we found out
what people think of the changes that took place in beta.

*CE:* Are the people who see it in gamma the same ones who
saw it in beta?

*Dave:* No. It's a fresh batch for gamma.

*CE:* Do you ever use the same testers for more than one game?

*Dave:* Oh yes. A lot of people will do up to three games in a
year. We have some guys who are really very picky and
specific about things, and we like to get their opinions.

*CE:* Do you ever get people who write to Infocom, asking to
be a game tester?

*Dave:* Yes, we get lots and lots of letters from people who
want to be testers. It's kind of tough, because a person who
just sends in a letter, we don't know good they are. So the
people who send in bugs are the ones we're more likely to ask
to be a tester.

*CE:* What about the issue of security in letting out a program
before release?

*Dave:* All of our disks have a number on them, a sort of secret
number, and we can type in a code and verify it. If it shows up
on a bulletin board, we can tell whose disk that was. A lot of
pirates think they can hack this number, but it's not imbedded
in the code. It's a mathematical thing that comes up with a
number. You'd have to take out parts of the game, which you
really can't do. Disassembling our stuff doesn't work because
we do it on a mainframe.

*CE:* You've mentioned in passing the hardships of dealing
with some of the computers because of the space limitations.
Do you have an easier time working with the senior machines,
the 16-bit machines?

*Dave:* We still have to write for that \[8-bit\] Atari, and that's
the limiting factor right now. We've not made a decision to
abandon the Atari 800.

*CE:* What do you see as the future of interactive fiction? Do
you see some advances that might take it in new diretions or
change it in any way that we can look forward to?

*Dave:* Sure. Hopefully it will get bigger, and we can write
more. We can take more space and write them faster. A lot of
what we do now is trying to squeeze things together. If I could
just sit down and write without worrying about how many
objects I've used. Right now we can only use 256 objects, but
on a larger system there's no limit.

*CE:* So you're saying that it depends on the consumer and
what kind of hardware most of them purchase -- how soon they
move away from 8-bit machines is completely or nearly so.

*Dave:* Well, I'm sure that a lot of people have given up on
their 8-bit Ataris, because most companies are not doing
anything for them, or if they do it's always the last thing they
convert. But there are other things coming. There's CDI, the
interactive comapct discs.

*CE:* We understand that Infocom is working with CDI.

*Dave:* I keep getting different stories about what the stage of
development is. But, yes, we are looking into that. There's a
huge amount of space there, but there's no protocol yet. No
one has decided what the operating system will be fore sure.
But our stuff seems like a natural for that type of thing
because you have random access that can go all over the place.
And with all that space, you can have pictures -- not necessarily
cartoons, but more like static illustrations to enhance a story.

At this point, we had to let Dave go back to his charges -- the
60 members of the 20 Los Angeles area high school teams who
were deep in the red tape of "Bureaucracy." (Story next
month.)
