<!--
	Title: Fame Games
	Author: Kathy Yakal, Feature Writer
	Source: COMPUTE!, v7(2)
	Date: February, 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->


*Though some authors and stars are lending only their names to
entertainment software, others are actively contributing to the game's
design. Here's a look at what's happening.*

You see it practically every time you flip through a magazine or
turn on the television. Fame lending its name to the cause of
advertising. Tennis players and movie stars and race-car drivers
hawking shampoo and sports equipment and clothing lines.

We've seen the same thing happen with microcomputers,
famous faces and voices telling us which one to buy. Some
entertainment software publishers are taking it a step farther;
instead of promoting a package, the personality is a major part
of the software, either as one of the game's characters, or even
its designer.

The Trillium series, produced by a division of Spinnaker
Software, is one of the best examples of this trend. It's a series
of interactive adventure games for the Commodore 64
and Apple II-series computers, based on novels by well-known
science fiction authors.

<figure>
	<img style="display: block; margin: auto; max-width: 90%;" src="/public/img/articles/compute-fame-games/screen-shots.png">
	<figcaption><em>Books, breakers, bad guys, and Bruce: Personalities and trends
		find a place in computer games. Pictured from left to right are</em>
		Fahrenheit 451, <em>part of the Trillium series from Spinnaker;
		Creative Software's</em> Break Street; Spy vs. Spy, <em>First Star Software's</em>
		adaptation of the comic strip from</em> MAD <em>magazine;</em> Bruce Lee,
		<em>from Datasoft; and the joint project of Infocom and author Douglas Adams,</em>
		A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</figcaption>
</figure>

In each of the games, the player takes the role
of the novel's main character, encountering
his or her problems and making decisions. Full-color graphics
and a sophisticated parser that understands several hundred
words make the games easy to play. A hint book and word list
are included in each package.

In late 1983, Spinnaker approached writer Michael Crichton,
thinking that some of his works might lend themselves
well to adventure games. He surprised them. He was just
completing work on an adventure game of his own. "They
came to acquire book rights and ended up taking a finished
game," says Crichton.

Crichton, author of *The Andromeda Strain* and *Congo*, and
writer/director of many science fiction films, was very interested
in interactive fiction. He had been asked to do some creative
work using laser disks but declined, believing that they
couldn't be accessed in a sufficiently sophisticated fashion.

He had hired programmer Steve Warrady in 1982 to help
translate an original story into Apple assembly language. The
result was *Amazon*, a graphics and text adventure in which the
player is an agent for NSRT, a high-tech research firm. The
player must travel to the Amazon and recover valuable emeralds
hidden in the Lost City of Chak, with the help of a
friendly (and often sarcastic) bird named Paco.

*Fahrenheit 451*, another game in the Trillium series, is a
sequel to Ray Bradbury's book of the same name. As Guy
Montag, the player lives in a future totalitarian society whose
government is committed to controlling the populace by
destroying all literature. Montag's mission is to restore to the
world the freedom it once had.

*Rendezvous With Rama* is based on the Arthur C. Clarke
novel. The player, as captain of a small scout spaceship which
has just encountered an alien starship hurtling into the solar
system, must explore it and try to make contact with alien
intelligence. (Clarke wrote a new ending to be used in the game.)

The fantasy *Dragonworld*, by Byron Preiss and Michael
Reaves, sends the player on a journey to rescue The Last
Dragon from the Duke of Darkness.

<figure>
	<img style="display: block; margin: auto; max-width: 90%;" src="/public/img/articles/compute-fame-games/more-screen-shots.png">
	<figcaption><p><em>Spinnaker's Trillium series, pictured from left to right, top row:</em>
		Rendezvous With Rama, Amazon, Shadowkeep, and Dragonworld.</p>
		<p><em>In this scene from</em> Ghostbusters, <em>a ghost is being
		sucked up by a ghost vacuum as the player drives from one
		building to another.</em></p>
</figure>

And here's an interesting twist: Science fiction writer Alan
Dean Foster wrote a novel based on the fantasy game *Shadowkeep*.
The player's task is to recapture the Shadowkeep, with its mazes
and monsters, and to free the good wizard Nacomedon. Up to
nine characters may be chosen by the player while exploring
the keep. Designed as an interactive adventure, the game in
corporates many aspects of role-playing fantasy software.

Software designer David Crane, a cofounder of
Activision, went to see the movie *Ghostbusters* on the
recommendation of a friend. "I think I may have enjoyed it a
lot more than some people because it was sprung on me," he
says. "From the first special effect, you knew that there was
something here that wasn't just stand-up comedy."

Two days after he saw the movie, someone at Activision
asked if he'd like to write a computer game based on the
movie. He took a day to think about it. "To do justice to any
game takes no less than 500 hours of my time, and I was going
to get married in six weeks."

His decision to do it was based partly on the fact that
he had already been working on the game without knowing it.
For a couple of months, Crane had been trying to develop a
game that had something to do with equipping a car and driving
it around city streets, but it was going nowhere. "It was a
game concept in search of a theme," he says.

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/compute-fame-games/ghostbusters-cover.jpg">

And the *Ghostbusters* theme fit perfectly. The theme song
from the movie plays through out the game (you can sing
along by following the bouncing ball at the game's opening) as
you buy a car and outfit it with equipment like ghost bait (to
trap the marshmallow man) and a ghost vacuum (to suck up
ghosts as you drive through the streets of the city). Buildings
flashing red are ghost-ridden, and it's your job to maneuver
each ghost into a ghost trap before he "slimes" you. The
game is won when you've captured enough ghosts to enter
Zuul.

"It's an amazing coincidence that what I was dofng
followed the script of the movie. I was able to put the theme and
game together in such a way that I could have what's really
an original game concept that embodied the spirit of the movie.

There were no coincidences involved in the development
of Infocom's computer game version of *A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*,
just a lot of mutual admiration. "Most people at Infocom were
*Hitchhiker's* fans, and Douglas Adams [author of the book] was
an Infocom game player" says Steve Meretzky.

*A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* is the story of Arthur
Dent, an ordinary human being who is thrust into some rather
extraordinary circumstances. After being told by Ford Prefect
(an alien in disguise) that the earth is about to be destroyed,
he hitches a ride on a Volgon spaceship, where he is tortured
by having poetry read to him. Surviving that, he is ejected into
space, and is rescued by the *Heart of Gold*, another space
ship, and brought to the planet Magrathea. Improbable things
continue to happen as the zany plot unfolds.

Meretzky, a program designer for Infocom, and Adams
worked together to translate the book's themes, characters, and
humor into a text adventure. "The game starts out following
the book pretty closely, up to your arrival on the Volgon
ship," he says. "From that point, until you get to the *Heart
of Gold*, the general story line is pretty similar, but a lot of the
more specific things that happen aren't the same things that
happen in the book.

"By the time you get to the *Heart of Gold*, the story diverges
almost completely from the story line of the book. But there
are a number of things that are just sort of alluded to in the
book that are gone into in much more detail in the game."

Adams, whose home is in England, visited Meretzky at
Infocom for about a week to map out the initial design of the
game. They found that their creative styles differed. Meretzky,
who had previously designed *Planetfall* and *Sorcerer* for
Infocom, usually came up with an overall concept for a game,
then went back and filled in details. Adams did it the opposite
way — details first.

So they kept in constant contact via electronic mail as
Meretzky was programming, then met again in England for
some intense final sessions ("We basically holed ourselves
up in a country inn and didn't come out until we had finished").

<figure>
	<img style="display: blokc; margin: auto; max-width: 90%;" src="/public/img/articles/compute-fame-games/even-more-screen-shots.png">
	<figcaption><em>Datasoft's</em> The Dallas Quest <em>and four from Epyx:</em>
		Barbie, 9 To 5 Typing, Breakdance, <em>and</em> GI Joe.</em></figcaption>
</figure>

Meretzky found a different kind of challenge in programming
a game whose story line had basically been written by
someone else. "In some ways it's easier, and in some ways it's
harder," he says. "It's easier be cause you have some constraints
on the universe you're going to be designing, and on the characters
you're going to be using, and a lot of the situations, and
you don't have to come up with as many ideas.

"But on the other hand, there's more of a challenge because
you want to take advantage of the features of an
interactive game, and you don't want it to be just a translation
of the book, because the book is necessarily linear. You want to
take advantage of the features and the power of the computer
to do something different."

Besides characters and stories from books and movies,
other famous personalities and trends have been incorporated
into entertainment software.

The recent awareness of breakdancing has spawned at
least two computer games: *Break Street*, by Creative Software, and
*Breakdance*, by Epyx. Both games feature breakdancers performing
various steps, and allow you to choreograph your own
dances or imitate routines already created.

Epyx has also released three other programs based on famous
faces. In *Barbie*, you can do the same things that young girls
have done with Barbie dolls for 25 years: shop for or design
clothes, style and color Barbie's hair, and dress her up. *G. I. Joe*,
taken from the familiar child's toy, lets you select a battle situation
and outfit your soldier to fight. And everyone gets to try
for revenge on Mr. Hart in *9 To 5 Typing*, a typing tutorial using
characters from the movie *9 To 5*.

J.R. haters don't have to wait until Friday night to see
their favorite villain. Datasoft's *Dallas Quest*, a text and graphics
adventure, puts you in South Fork and pits you against the
TV show's bad guys as you try to succeed in a dangerous task
given to you by Sue Ellen. Datasoft has also recently released
Conan, based on Arnold Schwartzenegger's musclebound
hero, and Bruce Lee, based on the karate expert of film fame.

Commodore and Marvel Adventures, along with the pro
gramming talent of Scott Adams, have designed an
adventure game based on the television show *The Hulk*. The
player controls the intellect of both Bruce Banner and his alter
ego, the big green guy, as he struggles to unlock the riddle of
the Chief Examiner.

Cartoon characters continue to show up in games, too. Sierra
On-Line, which brought you *BC's Quest For Tires*, has licensed
some of Walt Disney's creations for use in educational
software. *Donald Duck's Playground* helps develop money-handling
skills, as well as shape, color, and letter-matching abilities.
*Mickey's Space Adventure* promotes the development of
mapping and problem-solving skills while teaching about the
solar system. And W*innie The Pooh In The Hundred Acre Wood*
encourages good mapping and reading skills.

*Spy vs. Spy*, the cartoon strip series from the pages of
*MAD* magazine, is now a computer game, published by First
Star Software. In it, the White Spy and the Black Spy play
tricks on each other and oppose each other in competitive, humorous,
and dangerous situations.

A big name doesn't guarantee a superior game, but it may
improve sales. And when a personality doesn't just endorse
a product, but is actually involved in its design and production,
you've probably got a better than average program — if
the individual was working within his or her own area of
expertise.

Filmmakers and play producers try to get "names" for
their shows, not only because they'll draw bigger crowds, but
because, generally, that person had to evidence some talent to
become a name in the first place.

Will people buy software if a superstar was involved in its
making? Does Michael Crichton think that his name will influence
people to buy *Amazon*?

"I don't know. What do you think?" he says. "I don't
think it matters. I think what's important is that it's a good
game."