<!--
	Title: The Next Dimension
	Subtitle: From Zork to Zero: The Infocom Story
	Author: Wayne Williams
	Source: Retro Gamer, #10
	Date: November 2004
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<blockquote style="font-family: Terminal, Console, monospace;">
It was the company responsible for bringing text adventures into the
home, the company which for five years dominated the American
software charts with classic games such as Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy, and the company which in the face of falling sales
gambled on diversifying its product range and failed spectacularly.
Wayne Williams chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of
Interactive Fiction legends Infocom
</blockquote>

Dave Lebling and Marc Blank loved Colossal Cave, the famous first text adventure
game written by Willie Crowther and added to four years later by Don Woods.
The two MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students were seriously
addicted to the game. So addicted in fact that in 1977 they decided to write their own
version, convinced they could make a better, more natural world.
Lebling and Blank were part of a set called the Dynamic Modelling
(DM) group within MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science,
although they weren’t majoring in computers –- Lebling was
doing a degree in political science, while Blank was training
to become a doctor. With fellow DM student Tim Anderson they
began by creating a small four-room world using a parser that
Lebling had written in MDL (Muddle), a programming
language created in the MIT labs as a successor for LISP.

<figure class="float-left">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/infocom-board.jpg" alt="Infocom Board of Directors">
	<figcaption>The Infocom board of directors as of November 1979. From left:
		Marc Blank, Joel Berez, Al Vezza, JCR Licklinder and Chris Reeve</figcaption>
</figure>

Buoyed by the success of their first foray into adventure-game
writing they roped in a fourth student, Bruce Daniels,
and began work on what was eventually to become Zork. (Zork,
incidentally, was a nonsense word used in the MIT labs in the
1970s, as was Frob, a word that was later used in Zork II: The
Wizard of Frobozz). Although they made quick progress on designing
the world and its famous story, it was to be another two years –-
and after plenty of feedback from fellow students who could log in
and play the game six at a time via the university’s PDP-10
mainframe –- before the game was finally finished. There was no
commercial aim behind the creation of Zork; it was just a bit
of fun.

### Infocom is born

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/blank-berez-vezza.jpg" alt="Marc Blank, Joel Berez, and Al Vezza">
	<figcaption> Posing for a publicity shot. From left to right, Marc Blank,
		Joel Berez and Al Vezza</figcaption>
</figure>

Al Vezza, professor at MIT, Assistant Director of LCS and
leader of the DM group, had for a while been interested in putting
together a company to make money from computer
programming. Anderson, Lebling and Blank were all keen to
continue to work with one another, so it seemed natural for
them to join forces. Another professor, JCR Licklider (known as
Lick), who had raised funding for the LCS projects, was also
interested in being part of the new venture.

Infocom, a name chosen purely because of its
inoffensiveness to everyone, was officially founded on 22nd June
1979 by 10 LCS members in total, all of whom committed money –-
ranging from $400 up to $2,000 -– to buy their shares and get the
company off the ground. The founding members were: Tim
Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu
Galley, Dave Lebling, JCR Licklider, Chris Reeve and Al
Vezza. The original board of directors consisted of Lebling,
Vezza, Broos, Berez and Galley, although in November both
Lebling and Galley resigned from the board and were replaced by
Blank and Licklider. Shortly after Broos, who was president, also
stepped down and Berez took over. No one worked full-time for
the company at this point; it was a part-time project with everyone
keeping their day job or completing their studies. The
company office was a PO Box.

<figure class="float-right">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/personal-software-ad.png">
	<figcaption>Personal Software's artwork for Zork I suggested the game
		was a hack-and-slash arcade adventure. But as the screenshot
		shows, the actual game was rather more reserved</figcaptioN>
</figure>

The idea behind Infocom was to produce computer software.
What kind of computer software no one knew. Ideas such as
databases, office programs and medical software were all
bandied about. Eventually Anderson and Lebling suggested
the company retail Zork as it was already written and tested. That
made a lot of sense to the rest of the board and so it was agreed
that Zork would become Infocom’s first official release.

The initial problem the fledgling company faced was
how to get its massive 1Mb mainframe game to fit on to the
32Kb home machines. Thankfully Berez and Blank had
independently come up with the first part of the answer –- a
multiformat emulator known as the Z-Machine Interpretive
Program, or ZIP for short. ZIP would be different for each
machine it ran on but its aim would be the same -– to run a
virtual processor called Z-Machine. And Z-Machine’s role was equally
straightforward. As well as compressing text (using 5.5 bits
per character instead of the usual 8) it would run the Zork
Implementation Language, or ZIL, an updated version of Lebling’s
original Zork parser that the game would be written in. This meant
each computer platform would simply need a one-off ZIP writing
for it; the games wouldn’t need recoding from scratch. This was
something that would come in very handy when the company later
began producing a lot of games.

Of course even all this foresight and inventiveness didn’t
entirely solve the problem of space -– the other answer did
that. To get a 1Mb game on to a 32Kb platform, huge chunks
would have to be chopped out of it. Zork promptly became a game
in three parts.

<figure class="float-left-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/zork-covers.png" alt="Zork I, II, and III covers">
	<figcaption>The Zork trilogy - enter a door to the next dimension</figcaption>
</figure>

### Look who's Zorking

Personal Software (later known as VisiCorp), publisher of the
Visicalc spreadsheet, agreed to distribute Zork I for Infocom. In
November 1980 the first version of the game, for the PDP-11, hit
the shelves. It was followed just one month later by the first home
version, for the TRS-80. Bruce Daniels, now working for Apple,
wrote a ZIP for the Apple II and that became the third format to
be released.

Although the game was moderately successful, selling
1,500 copies for the TRS-80 and 6,000 copies for the Apple II,
Infocom wasn’t too happy with Personal Software’s commitment
or how the game had been marketed. The original box art,
with a moustachioed warrior hacking and slashing away,
misrepresented the nature of Zork which was all about clever
thinking and puzzle solving. Infocom, which had always
intended to just be a software developer not a game publisher,
decided it could market its own products better and bought back
the remaining $32,000’s worth of stock. It then repackaged the
disks to reflect the true nature of the game and in October 1981
started selling it itself. A month later Zork I was joined on the
shelves by the inevitable Zork II, and Marketing Manager Mort
Rosenthal joined the company, which now had its first office in
Boston, Massachusetts. Berez and Blank also became its first fulltime
employees.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/hhgttg-map.jpg" alt="Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy InvisiClues map">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/hhgttg-invisiclues.jpg" alt="Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Invisiclues cover">
	<figcaption>Can't get the Babel fish? You'll be needing Infocom's
		InvisiClues booklet then</figcaption>
</figure>

The two Zork games did very well, and with $160,000 in sales
by the end of 1981, Infocom was on the up. Two new games
followed: Blank, who loved detective novels, wrote Deadline,
then came the third Zork adventure. Steve Meretzky, who
would later go on to create many of Infocom’s most famous games,
joined in November 1981 as a tester on Deadline after the
existing one, Meretzky’s roommate Michael Dornbrook, went off
temporarily to the University of Chicago’s business administration
programme. Dornbrook stayed involved in Infocom however.
Noticing the number of letters the company received from players
begging for help, he had previously set up the Zork User
Group, a $2 per-hint service and a newsletter known as the New
Zork Times, and with his father’s help continued to run it out of a
Milwaukee PO Box.

Dornbrook’s most famous innovation was the idea of
InvisiClues –- solutions to the games’ trickiest puzzles written in
invisible ink which could be revealed using a special pen.
This was an idea that was suggested to Mike at a party by
a friend after he bemoaned the problem of sending the same
hints and solutions out time after time. Two manufacturers in the
US were capable of producing the books and pens, and luckily one
of them was based nearby.

InvisiClues were sold through bookshops and were a massive
success, going on to make up most of the top 10 in the
computer book charts –- until (following complaints from other
publishers) the chart compilers lumped them together as one
publication. At this point InvisiClues simply maintained a
stranglehold on the number one position. Each game came with a
coupon that allowed the player to buy an InvisiClue booklet and a
complete map for $4.95 (at cost). If you didn’t have the coupon,
perhaps because you’d pirated the software for example, it
would cost you $8.95. By 1983, when the Zork User Group was
finally absorbed into Infocom, it had over 20,000 members.

### A fateful decision

On New Year’s Day 1982 the company moved to another office
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Encouraged as the board was by
the huge success of its games, it was also jealous of the real money
being made by business software developers. Infocom’s adventures
sold for under $50 dollars each, while business programs went for
around 10 times that amount. In particular Infocom was envious of
Lotus Development which had been created by some friends
from MIT (and Mitch Kapor, the man who had distributed Zork I
for Infocom at Personal Software). Many people within Infocom felt
the company should be looking to diversify, and so in October
1982 a new business division was created.

<div class="float-right-half" style="display: flex;">
	<figure>
		<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/new-zork-times.jpg" alt="The New Zork Times">
		<figcaption>Issue one of the New Zork Times, the newsletter of the
			Zork User Group</figcaption>
	</figure>
	<figure>
		<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/infocom-ad.jpg" alt="Infocom Ad">
		<figcaption>Infocom's early ads poked fun at the simple graphics
			available on home computers</figcaption>
	</figure>
</div>

This decision wasn’t all that strange, given that Infocom’s
original raison d’etre had been to produce general software. Some
of the older members of the company, Vezza in particular,
were a little uncomfortable with running a firm that only made
games; they wanted to do something slightly more serious.
They also felt that Infocom’s current success was a bubble
that wouldn’t last forever, and that they needed to branch out in
order to continue to grow. It was a commercial decision that made
a lot of sense.

Brian Berkowitz and Richard Ilson, who had worked together
in an LCS group called Project MAC on the same floor as the DM
group at MIT, were thinking of building a relational database
and took the idea to Infocom because they knew the people
there. This coincided with Infocom’s wish to do something
different, and so it looked like fate. The first product from this
new venture was swiftly announced –- a relational
database called Cornerstone. To help Infocom’s transition to a
producer of serious software, Berez became Chief Operating
Officer and Vezza took over as Chief Executive Officer.

<div class="float-left-half article-sidebar-dark">

## &gt;The Implementor's Creed

Infocom’s game designers were affectionately known as ‘implementors’, or
Imps for short. Stu Galley, one of the company’s founding members,
circulated an internal memo which outlined the design challenges a
successful implementor needed to fulfil. It was entitled The Implementor’s
Creed, and read as follows:

<div style="text-align: center; color: var(--light);">

I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.

I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.

My readers should become immersed in the story and
forget where they are. They should forget about the
keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the
experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.

I want as many people as possible to share these
experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds,
and a broad range of 'reading levels'. I can
categorize our past works and discover where the range
needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the
categories to reach every popular taste.

In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader.
Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can
make the final decisions about content and style. But
I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from
any source, in the hope that they will make the
sharing better.

I know what an artist means by saying, "I hope I can
finish this work before I ruin it." Each work-in-progress
reaches a point of diminishing returns, where
any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it
better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point.
And to make my best estimate of when it will reach
that point.

I can't create quality work by myself. I rely on other
implementors to help me both with technical wizardry
and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I
rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my
vision better and where the rough edges of the work
need polishing. I rely on marketers and salespeople to
help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on
others to handle administrative details so I can
concentrate on the vision.

None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work.
Let no one doubt my dedication to my art.

</div>
</div>

In the meantime, game after game followed. All names that
adventure fans will be more than familiar with: Suspended, The
Witness, Planetfall (Steve Meretzky’s first game), Infidel,
and Enchanter (developed with the working title Zork IV). Every
game was a massive hit, selling upwards of 100,000 copies each.
Adverts at the time proclaimed “Infocom –- The Next Dimension”,
and the games clogged up the sales charts. By the end of 1983
all of the company’s games were in the top 40 Softsel chart, and
the three-year-old Zork I was still at the very top ahead of the likes
of Lode Runner, Zaxxon, Frogger, Ultima III and Microsoft Flight
Simulator. By the end of 1983 Infocom’s annual sales totalled
more than $6 million.

1984 saw Infocom’s most famous success. Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams was a big fan of
the company’s work, having been introduced to its adventures with
Suspended. He was keen to have his books turned into a game and
knew Infocom was the company to do it. Meretzky was assigned
the job of working with Adams because of his experience in the
sci-fi genre (Planetfall having garnered plenty of best game
awards in 83/84) and the two got together for numerous
discussions on the game, both face-to-face and electronically.

Hitchhiker’s was produced with the two authors working
remotely -– Steve in Massachusetts, Douglas in
London -– on two DEC System 20s (the computer all Infocom’s
adventures were written on at the time) hooked up over the Dialcom
network. The game came out in 1984 and was the company’s
biggest success since Zork. A sequel was discussed, planned
and even tentatively started a few years later, but the sales from
Bureaucracy, Adams’ only other Infocom game, were poorer than
hoped so the idea was shelved.

<div class="float-left article-sidebar-dark">

## &gt;What's in the box?

<img class="float-left-half" src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/hhgttg-packaging.jpg" alt="Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy feelies">

One thing that always stood out about Infocom games was their
packaging, or rather the extras that came with every game. The first
game to include these elements was Deadline. A lack
of space meant there wasn’t room to feature all the items in
the game, so Marc Blank asked Infocom’s new
advertising agency Giardini/Russel to make them
up as physical objects and include them in box as
additional extras. Buyers of the game were surprised to
not only receive the disks and manual in the box but also
photos, interrogation reports, lab analysis, and some pills
“found near to the body”. It was inspired and quickly
became a signature of the Infocom games, as well as helping to
thwart piracy.

Over the years that followed the extras became more and more
outlandish. Among the items included in the Hitchhiker’s game was
a pair of Joo Janta 200 Super Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses,
a microscopic space fleet, a 'Don’t Panic' badge, and some
bellybutton fluff. There was a glow-in-the-dark stone inside the
Wishbringer box, a matchbook with The Witness, a scratch-and-sniff
card with Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a Flathead Calendar 883
with Zork Zero, and postcards with Planetfall. Everyone has their
own favourites.

By the time Infocom brought the packaging creation in-house in
1984 the company was spending around $60,000 per game on it.

<figure style="margin: 0;">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/deadline-pills.jpg" alt="Deadline feelie pills">
	<figcaption>Deadline came with a small packet of pills, while
		Hitchhiker's came with several bizarre items
		including bellybutton fluff!</figcaption>
</figure>

</div>

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/covers-1.jpg">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/covers-2.jpg">
	<figcaption>Following the success of the Zork trilogy, many of Infocom's later
		games sold in great numbers</figcaption>
</figure>

### Running into trouble

By the end of 1984, when the firm moved to new and very
expensive premises at 125 Cambridge Park Drive, Infocom’s
annual sales were up to $10 million. Development on the
increasingly costly Cornerstone was continuing and by now the
increase in programmers, marketing and admin staff had
brought Infocom’s number of employees up to 100.

Infocom sought outside Venture Capital funding, but its
mix of games and planned business software found few
takers. Gulf and Western, owners of Simon and Schuster,
offered $20 million for the entire games side of the
company, but the offer was rejected. In the end Infocom
only managed to secure $500,000, but remained
confident that its database could be funded by the future
revenue from its games sales.

After a long time in development the $495 program
finally debuted in 1985 to rave reviews. Cornerstone was ahead
of its time with plenty of well-thought-out and innovative
features. It had friendly menus, users could add descriptions to
files and fields and it would only allow you to enter the correct
information (only company names in the company field for example).
It was able to autocorrect spelling errors, multivalue and variable
length fields were supported, and it was compatible with all the
other databases of the day, including Lotus 123, dBase II, and
Symphony. In keeping with Infocom’s more famous products it
also supported parsing and could recognise friendly date statements
such as ‘Next Monday’. It also fitted comfortably onto a single
floppy disk.

Unfortunately, for all its pluses, Cornerstone also had
problems. Unlike dBase II, it wasn’t programmable -– you had
to use the built-in functions. Also, by 1985 the PC was
becoming the dominant computer platform.
Cornerstone’s use of a virtual machine to make it platform
independent (like the adventure games) meant it ran slowly,
especially when handling larger databases.

The software went on to sell well, clocking up 10,000 sales
in its first year. Unfortunately, the cost of producing it –- $2.5
million -– coupled with the fact that it brought in $1.8 million in
sales, rather than the projected $4.7 gross profit, made it an
expensive failure. This alone probably wouldn’t have killed
off Infocom, but the company’s games were also not doing as
well as previously. The text adventure market had begun to
die. Graphical adventures, on the next generation of computers
like the Amiga and Atari, were rapidly becoming the way
forward. Infocom’s 1985 annual sales totalled $10 million, the
same as the year before, but way below its projected revenue
of $12 million plus.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/cornerstone-box.jpg" alt="Cornerstone box">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/cornerstone-demo.jpg" alt="Cornerstone screen shot">
	<figcaption>A demo version of Cornerstone was produced to show people
		how easy it was to use</figcaption>
</figure>

Redundancies were unavoidable. However, the losses
were so great the business division was forced to close
down entirely. In an attempt to resurrect Cornerstone and at
least get back some of the outlay, the software’s price was
dropped to $99.95, with little success. It was a serious blow to
Infocom and Al Vezza who had been convinced the company
could “out-Lotus, Lotus”.

### Activision

On 13th June 1986, Infocom, by now down to 40 employees
(many of whom had taken pay cuts to keep the company
afloat), was purchased by Activision for $7.5 million. At
first many believed this to be a good thing. It meant the
company could continue at least. Unfortunately for Infocom, six
months after the takeover Activision’s CEO Jim Levy was
replaced by Bruce Davis. Davis had been against the takeover
from the start and set out to make life as difficult, and costly,
for the new acquisition as possible. Infocom’s games now had
a much shorter shelf life and the company was expected to produce
eight of them a year, rather than the usual four or five, but with no extra
staff. Sales fell to around 10,000 copies per game.

<figure>
	<div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; gap: 2em;">
	<img style="height: 12em;" src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/beyond-zork-cover.jpg">
	<img style="height: 12em;" src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/beyond-zork-screen-shot.jpg">
	</div>
	<figcaption class="center">Beyond Zork broke with tradition, offering graphics. Sort of.
		You got a little map at least</figcaption>
</figure>

In 1986 Infocom bowed down to public pressure and introduced
graphics into its games for the first time. Fooblitzky, a multiplayer
board game in which four players (as dogs) competed against one
another in a race to collect the correct four objects, was the first
of these. It had graphics, but they were two-colour and poorly drawn.
The game unsurprisingly flopped.

<figure class="float-left-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/zork-zero.png" alt="Zork Zero">
	<figcaption>Playing the Tower of Bozbar in Zork Zero, an Infocom adventure
		with full-blown graphics</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/fooblitzky.png" alt="Fooblitzky">
	<figcaption>Fooblitzky was something different for Infocom, a multiplayer
		board game in which you played as a dog</figcaption>
</figure>

In 1987 the company released Brian Moriarty’s Beyond Zork, its
first game with a graphical user interface (of sorts), including a
map, a separate window for the inventory items and various RPGstyle
additions. A year later Steve Meretzky’s Zork Zero came out
packed with full-colour VGA delights, including graphical
games and puzzles. Unfortunately, these concessions
to changing public tastes weren’t enough to save the company, and
in May 1989 Activision forced Infocom to lay off 15 of its
remaining 26 staff and move to the company’s headquarters in
Silicon Valley. With just five of the remaining Infocom staff
members prepared to make the move, the truth was undeniable.
Infocom, as we knew and loved it, was dead.

<div class="clear-float" style="height: 1em;">&nbsp;</div>

<div class="float-left-half article-sidebar-dark">

## &gt;Adventure timeline

<style>
.article-temp {
	tr:nth-child(odd) { color: var(--light); }
}
</style>

<table class="article-temp"><tbody>
<tr><td>November 1980</td><td>Zork I (Dave Lebling/Marc Blank)</td></tr>
<tr><td>November 1981</td><td>Zork II (Dave Lebling/Marc Blank)</td></tr>
<tr><td>April 1982</td><td>Deadline (Marc Blank)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1982</td><td>Zork III (Dave Lebling/Marc Blank) and Starcross (Dave Lebling)</td></tr>
<tr><td>March 1983</td><td>Suspended (Mike Berlyn)</td></tr>
<tr><td>June 1983</td><td>The Witness (Stu Galley)</td></tr>
<tr><td>August 1983</td><td>Planetfall (Steve Meretzky)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1983</td><td>Enchanter (Dave Lebling/Marc Blank)</td></tr>
<tr><td>November 1983</td><td>Infidel (Mike Berlyn)</td></tr>
<tr><td>March 1984</td><td>Sorcerer (Steve Meretzky)</td></tr>
<tr><td>June 1984</td><td>Seastalker (Stu Galley/Jim Lawrence)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1984</td><td>Cutthroats (Mike Berlyn/Jerry Wolper)</td></tr>
<tr><td>October 1984</td><td>Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Steve Meretzky/Douglas Adams)</td></tr>
<tr><td>November 1984</td><td>Suspect (Dave Lebling)</td></tr>
<tr><td>June 1985</td><td>Wishbringer (Brian Moriarty)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1985</td><td>A Mind Forever Voyaging (Steve Meretzky)</td></tr>
<tr><td>October 1985</td><td>Spellbreaker (Dave Lebling)</td></tr>
<tr><td>February 1986</td><td>Ballyhoo (Jeff O’Neill)</td></tr>
<tr><td>June 1986</td><td>Trinity (Brian Moriarty)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1986</td><td>Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Steve Meretzky)</td></tr>
<tr><td>October 1986</td><td>Moonmist (Stu Galley/Jim Lawrence)</td></tr>
<tr><td>November 1986</td><td>Enchanter Trilogy</td></tr>
<tr><td>January 1987</td><td>Zork Trilogy and Hollywood Hijinx (Dave Anderson/Liz Cyr-Jones)</td></tr>
<tr><td>March 1987</td><td>Bureaucracy (Douglas Adams and “The Staff of Infocom”)</td></tr>
<tr><td>June 1987</td><td>Stationfall (Steve Meretzky) and The Lurking Horror (Dave Lebling)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1987</td><td>Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It (Jeff O’Neill) and Plundered Hearts (Amy Briggs)</td></tr>
<tr><td>October 1987</td><td>Beyond Zork (Brian Moriarty)</td></tr>
<tr><td>November 1987</td><td>Border Zone (Marc Blank)</td></tr>
<tr><td>December 1987</td><td>Solid Gold: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Zork I</td></tr>
<tr><td>January 1988</td><td>Sherlock – Riddle of the Crown Jewels (Bob Bates)</td></tr>
<tr><td>March 1988</td><td>Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen (Steve Meretzky/Tom Snyder Productions) and Gamma Force (Amy Briggs/Tom Snyder Productions)</td></tr>
<tr><td>April 1988</td><td>ZorkQuest I (Elisabeth Langosy/Tom Snyder Productions)</td></tr>
<tr><td>July 1988</td><td>Solid Gold: Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Planetfal</td></tr>
<tr><td>Augut 1988</td><td>ZorkQuest II (Elisabeth Langosy/Tom Snyder Productions)</td></tr>
<tr><td>September 1988</td><td>Solid Gold: Wishbringer and Quarterstaff (Scott Schmitz and Ken Updike)</td></tr>
<tr><td>October 1988</td><td>Zork Zero (Steve Meretzky)</td></tr>
<tr><td>November 1988</td><td>BattleTech (Westwood Associates)</td></tr>
<tr><td>March 1989</td><td>Shogun (Dave Lebling based on the James Clavell book) and Journey (Marc Blank)</td></tr>
<tr><td>June 1989</td><td>Arthur (Bob Bates)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>

## &gt;Steve Meretzky interview

<img class="float-left-narrow" src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/steve-meretzky.jpg" alt="Steve Meretzky">

Infocom’s most famous Imp, now principal game designer at
online-gaming portal WorldWinner.com, talked to us
about his memories of the great company and what it was like
working with Douglas Adams.

**Retro Gamer: How did you get involved with Infocom?**

**Steve Meretzky:** I already knew several of the founders, Marc
Blank and Joel Berez. We were all involved with the film program at
MIT. I was also rooming with Mike Dornbrook, who was
Infocom’s first (and, at the time, only) game tester. When he left
town to attend business school in Chicago, Marc asked me if I’d like
to replace him as Infocom’s playtester. I tested Deadline, Zork
III, and Starcross, and then Marc offered me the chance to become
a game writer (‘implementor’, in Infocom parlance).

**RG: What is your favourite memory of working at Infocom?**

**SM:** There are just so many –- it was such a young, fun group of
people and we were more like a big extended family than a
company. A lot of my favourite memories revolve around
parties. We had beer every Friday at 5pm, but often these
would be expanded to fully fledged parties or some sort of
unique festivity. For instance, the time we put on a mock trial
of Hollywood Dave for killing all the goldfish in the fish pond (in
an attempt to clean the pond). Or the time we had a graduation
ceremony for our CEO, Al Vezza, after he attended a weeklong
'CEO School'. Or the Halloween party where we put on an
'interactive play', with audience members shouting parser-like
instructions to the cast.

Another fun thing we often did at these Friday parties was
to hold Infocom versions of TV game shows, such as the 20,000
Zorkmid Pyramid. And for a period of several months, the
Friday parties included hermit crab races, complete with parimutuel
betting [where the gambler bets against other
gamblers, not the house].

There were also incredible parties that the company would
throw for the press at trade shows, such as the Bring Your
Own Brain party at the Field Museum in Chicago, where we
sent invitees on a scavenger hunt through the museum for
prizes. Or another party at the Field Museum, where we hired
the Second City cast to create skits promoting Stationfall and
The Lurking Horror. Or the party at Elvis Presley’s former mansion
in Las Vegas, with the Murder-To-Go mystery troupe staging a
killing to promote our latest game, Suspect.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/meretzky-halloween.jpg" alt="Steve Meretzky and Betty Rock">
	<figcaption>Steve Meretzky and Betty Rock at Infocom's Halloween party</figcaption>
</figure>

Another great memory is the pre-Christmas season when our
orders were running far ahead of the production facility’s ability to
assemble the game boxes. So employees signed up for
Saturday and Sunday shifts to keep the assembly lines running,
operating labelling machines, shrinkwrapping machines, etc. It
was a great example of the whole company pulling together
but also having a fun time.

But certainly the best memory I have is meeting the lovely Betty
Rock, who worked in the sales department at Infocom and who
will join me in celebrating our 19th anniversary in a few days!

**RG: Congratulations! Tell us about Planetfall. What was it like
designing your first game?**

**SM:** Slow at first, as I had to learn a new programming
language (ZIL). Also, at the beginning, I was still spending
about half my time testing. So even though I started writing the
game in September of 1982, it didn’t really start coming
together until perhaps early spring of ‘83. But I quickly
learned that writing games was even more fun than testing them.

**RG: Were you surprised by people’s emotional response to
Floyd’s death?**

**SM:** I wasn’t surprised that people had an emotional
response; I wrote that scene to create one. But I was certainly
surprised by the magnitude of the response. And by the fact
that people are still asking about it, 20 years later!

<figure class="float-left">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/meretzky-and-wife.jpg" alt="Steve Meretzky and wife">
	<figcaption>Master Imp Steve Meretzky at a trade show complete with Don't
		Panic badge and wife-to-be</figcaption>
</figure>

**RG: What was the game design process like in general?**

**SM:** It varied a lot from game to game. If a game was a sequel –-
such as my second game, Sorcerer –- it was necessary to
follow the content and style of the previous game or games. In
that case, where Sorcerer was the fifth game in the sequence, after
the Zork Trilogy and Enchanter, there was a huge amount of
world background and history to be consistent with, so I spent a
long time combing through the code for those four games,
compiling a detailed database of Zork lore. (I continued to maintain
that database through subsequent games, and ended up
including it within a game –- Zork Zero in 1988 -– as referenced
through a copy of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica.)

If a game was an adaptation of material from another
medium, as in the case of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
that also brought a series of constraints on the design
process.

Sometimes one element of the design -– the storyline, the
geography, the puzzles, the humour, the package elements –-
would be dominant and would be developed first, with the
other elements then formed around that. But other times
they would all be fairly equal and would evolve in parallel.

<figure class="float-right">
<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/infocom-party.jpg" alt="Infocom party">
<figcaption>The 20,000 Zorkmid Pyramid game - just another Friday night
	party at Infocom</figcaption>
</figure>

**RG: How did you come to work with Douglas Adams?**

**SM:** Douglas was an Infocom player and fan, and so when
he, his agent and his publisher began discussing the subject of
a computer-game adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide, he was
adamant that it be with Infocom. Marc Blank suggested
that I collaborate on the game with Douglas, partly due to
fortunate timing (I had just completed Sorcerer), partly
because many people had found Planetfall to be
reminiscent of the humour of Hitchhiker’s Guide, and partly
because I was the only implementor who was as tall
as Douglas.

**RG: What was he like?**

**SM:** The best way to describe Douglas is that he was the ideal
dinner companion. He could speak intelligently and with wit
about almost any topic under the sun. Unfortunately, as a
collaborator, he suffered from the fact that he was the world’s worst
procrastinator! I had to practically camp out on his doorstep in
England to get him to finish his stuff for the game. Otherwise,
working with him was great. He had such a different perspective
on things, and came up with puzzles and scenes that I’d never
have thought of in a million years on my own -– having the game lie
to you, or using a parser failure as the words which fell through a
wormhole in the universe and started an interstellar war, or
having an object like "no tea".

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
<img src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/lgop-ad.jpg" alt="Leather Goddesses of Phobos ad">
<figcaption>The advert for Steve's Leather Goddesses of Phobos was suitably tongue-in-cheek</figcaption>
</figure>

**RG: How did the infamous Babel fish puzzle originate?**

**SM:** The basic idea was by Douglas, and I added some
refinements (like the Upper-Half-Of-The-Room Cleaning Robot).
More interesting is how close the puzzle came to being removed
from the game; most of Infocom’s testing group thought it was too
hard. I was going into a meeting with them just as Douglas was
leaving for the airport at the end of his final trip to Infocom, and I
asked him, "What should I tell them about the Babel fish
puzzle?" He said, "What should you tell them? Tell them to fuck
off!" So the puzzle stayed... and its very hardness became a cult
thing. Infocom even sold T-shirts that said “I got the Babel fish!"

**RG: What are your memories of working on the Hitchhiker’s game?**

**SM:** Around May of 1984, with the game just a few weeks away from
its deadline for the start of alpha testing, and about half the game
still undesigned, I went over to England. Douglas was not only
procrastinating on the game, he was also procrastinating on the
fourth Hitchhiker’s book, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. His
agent had sent him to a country inn in western England, far from
the distractions of London life. That’s where I went, with
instructions to camp out on his doorstep until the game design
was done. We spent four days at this really pleasant inn, a former
baronial mansion, sipping expensive wines and designing the
game. How can life get any better than that?

**RG: What is your favourite Infocom game?**

<figure class="float-right-half">
	<div style="display: flex; gap: 1em;">
	<img style="display: inline; height: 8em; width: auto;" src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/amfv-cover.jpg" alt="A Mind Forever Voyaging cover">
	<img style="display: inline; height: 8em; width: auto;" src="/public/img/articles/retro-gamer-the-next-dimension/amfv-screen-shot.jpg" alt="A Mind Forever Voyaging screen shot">
	</div>
	<figcaption>A Mind Forever Voyaging won awards and proved that it was
		possible to make socially aware adult games</figcaption>
</figure>

**SM:** My favourite Infocom game has always been Dave Lebling’s
Starcross, but I also love Jeff O’Neill’s Nord and Bert Couldn’t
Make Head or Tail of It for being so original and different. Of my
own games, my favourite would be A Mind Forever Voyaging, because
it was my largest, most serious, and most socially relevant work,
and because I feel it showed that computer games could be more
than an adolescent pastime, but could instead be used to explore
Big Issues. Except perhaps for Floyd’s death, it’s the game of
mine that seems to have touched people most deeply.

**RG: Were there any games that never got finished? (You were
working on a Titanic game that got cancelled we believe?)**

**SM:** Not many during Infocom days, but many since then. I
never really started the Titanic game at Infocom, although it
probably would have been my next game after Zork Zero if
Activision hadn’t shut Infocom down at that point. I tried selling
the Titanic idea numerous times during post-Infocom days, in
particular when I had my own development studio (Boffo
Games), but was told over and over that "no one's interested in
the Titanic". So it was with a bit of irony that I watched Cameron’s
movie become the highest grossing film in history.

**RG: Have you ever had the inclination to write another text
adventure? (Such as Leather Goddesses 3 or Planetfall 2: The
Search for Floyd?)**

**SM:** Actually, I wrote a design for a new Planetfall game for
Activision back in 1993 and 1994. It asked for rewrite after
rewrite, and finally just killed the game. Every couple of years,
I hear a rumour that they’re going to revive it. But I would
like to write a text adventure at some point when I have some
time... Perhaps after the kids go to college...
