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	Title: A Zork By Any Other Name
	Source: The New Zork Times, v3(1)
	Date: Winter 1984
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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Have you arrested the murderer in our mystery thriller "Was It
Murder?" Or found the alien artifact in "Celestus"? Or maybe met a
somewhat childish robot in "Lost Planet"? No, those aren't the names
of our newest games —- in fact, they're rejected names for some
existing ones (can you guess which?). As a player, you've probably
taken the names of our games for granted. We didn't. And if you think
that writing the games is tough, you should have been there when we
named them.

To be honest, some names were easier than others. *Zork*, for example,
was simple, since it was used by some of the founders of Infocom
back in 1977, when the game was first written. At that time the only
other "adventure" game was the original Adventure, and authors
Marc Blank and Tim Anderson were at a complete loss in thinking up a
good name for their new game. Since they wanted people to play it, and
since you can't run a nameless program, they needed something
quick. Blank chose *Zork*, a nonsense word commonly used at the MIT Lab
for Computer Science as an all-purpose interjection. He figured that
he would think of something else later, but the name stuck (he never
did come up with anything better, anyway) and survives to this day.

As an aside, the original *Zork* had well over 200 rooms, a vocabulary of
nearly 1000 words, and required a mainframe computer with over a
megabyte of memory! Infocom's *Zork* trilogy has about twice the
material of the original mainframe *Zork* in about one quarter of a megabyte.
That's progress.

When Marc Blank started writing Infocom's first mystery, he tentatively
called it "Was It Murder?" After all, it looked like a suicide. The
name was distinctly bland, but nobody around Infocom could think
of anything better (give us a break, we had only three employees). We
gave the problem to our ad agency, Giardini/Russell (G/R), who came up
with the name *Deadline* along with its distinctive logo.

Dave Lebling gave his science fiction scenario a working title of "A
Gift From Space". Nobody's socks were knocked off, so we gave G/R
another shot. They proposed five possible titles: Celestus, The Linking,
Alien Intercept, Stardate: 2186, and *Starcross*. Celestus didn't have
the right down-at-the-heels image for your ship's name. The Linking
sounded too much like a Stephen King novel. Alien Intercept begged
for a joystick. And Stardate: 2186 wasn't even good enough for a Star
Trek episode. *Starcross*, however, with its reference to the stars and its
similarity to the word starcrossed, had the right sort of feel, and was
elected.

We did a little better internally with some of our recent games. Mike
Berlyn's *Suspended* was originally called Suspension (Suspenders,
affectionately) for the main character's state of suspended animation,
but *Suspended* seemed to work a little better. Stu Galley's 1930's-style
mystery, in which the player is actually present at the time of a
murder, led us to immediately think of the title Witness. G/R suggested
changing this slightly to *The Witness*, a title more in keeping with titles in
the Raymond Chandler era. *Enchanter*, written by Blank and
Lebling, had its name before it was even started. It just sounded right
and its only serious competition was Zork IV. A strenuous argument
raged for weeks: was it a *Zork* or wasn't it. It wasn't.

*Planetfall* was titled Sole Survivor by its author, Steve Meretzky, and
later shortened to just Survivor. When we discovered another game
called Survivor, we decided we'd rather switch than fight. G/R went to
it again and submitted a list about 30 long, their favorite of which was
Lost Planet. Reaction was less than enthusiastic, not the least because it
reminded two of us of the TV series, Lost in Space. Blank suggested
*Planetfall* during a long, frustrating meeting — he thought he had seen it
once in an SF book as a word meaning arrival on a new planet
(much like landfall). Nobody really believed him, but it was never
improved upon.

Our first Tale of Adventure might have been called Pyramid. Though
uninspired, it was used through the game's initial testing and had a loyal
following due to its descriptive nature. G/R was unimpressed and
suggested *Infidel*. Infocom was unimpressed: it sounded more like
something from the Crusades than an exploration for a lost pyramid. But in
combination with its distinctive logo and the proposed package design, we
relented. We even changed the game a bit to make it work better.

That takes us to the present. As this newsletter appears, we will be
releasing the sequent to Enchanter, Spellbreaker. No that's not right — I
think it's Spellbound. Or was it *Sorcerer*? I don't know, really. And I
don't care. I'm just glad I'm not working on ad copy.
