<!--
	Title: Interview: Brian Moriarty goes Beyond Zork
	Source: Questbusters, v4(8)
	Date: August 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

QB: The rumors we've heard about *Beyond Zork* say it's not a text adventure,
but some new kind of interactive game.

Moriarty: That's not true at all. Certainly it's a text adventure. It's fairly
similar to what we've done before. When I finished *Trinity*, I sat back and looked at
our interface and said, "What can I do within the constraints of our technology
to make the adventuring experience a little easier?" I looked at the features of
different home computers, the features people wanted, and at some other types of
games. So *Beyond Zork* is a fairly large but fairly conventional text adventure with
this new interface that makes it somewhat easier and more enjoyable to play. This is
in our Plus system, so it doesn't run at all on C-64s or Atari eight-bit machines.

QB: Does it use a type-in parser?

Moriarty: Yes. We still don't have the means to get rid of that, though I really
would like to someday. And what pieces of the interface you get depends on your
computer. The Apple II version, for example, doesn't have as many sexy
features as, say the Atari ST. But we tried to scrunch as many of the features, the
best versions of them, into each machine. They all have programmable function
keys. So you can press a key and have it type the word examine or look (and a
carriage return) for you. You can set them up any way you want I think there are
ten on all versions but the C-128, which only has eight function keys.

In watching myself play, I found the command I typed most was look. So I
said this is silly, why can't the room description always be visible? After all,
that's what Scott Adams did in his original twelve adventures, with a split-screen
showing the room description, exits and your inventory at the top, while
you type in the bottom. So I said, let's take a giant step backwards. The screen is
split in half in most versions. On the left side of the top half is a programmable
window. It can contain either the room description or your inventory—or your
stats, which I'll explain in a minute. So as you walk from room to room, instead
of the description coming in-line with your commands as it does now in our
games, this window is updated. If you say inventory; the window changes to
show your possessions. And you can program that window to show only one or
the other, or the stats. By saying inventory and priority, that freezes the
inventory in this window, and the room descriptions will then appear in the main
window as they normally do.

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/questbusters-brian-moriarty-interview/mushrooms.png" alt="Very pixelated clip art of a pile of mushrooms">

Another thing I liked about the old Scott Adams games was the list of room exits
at the top of the screen. That's a part of writing room descriptions that has always
bugged me: We have to have at least one sentence telling where the exits are. That
takes up a lot of space, and there are only so many interesting ways to do that So I
said let's have a list of exits at the top. Now that's not such a revolutionary idea.
I thought of putting in a compass rose, and all this other stuff, but finally I came
up with an on-screen map that draws a typical Infocom map-little boxes with
lines and arrows connecting them. The right side of the upper screen has a little
graphics map that draws itself and updates as you walk around It shows rooms as
boxes and lines as their connections: If you open a door, a line appears to the next
room. Dark rooms have question marks in them. The one you're in is
highlighted, while the others are outlined This feature doesn't work quite the same
on all machines. The Apple II can't draw those lines the way I wanted them;
instead, it uses ASCII characters [letters and numbers]. Other than that, the
mapping is the same.

This on-screen map won't replace the one you draw yourself, but does make it much
easier to draw. It won't show rooms you haven't been to yet, but shows exits of
your current room and all the exits of the adjoining rooms that you've visited. And
in fact, having that on-screen map allowed me to create a few puzzles that really don't
work very well without it.

The single greatest feature—and there are plenty of others—is called Undo. Say
you drop something and it disappears, you can say Undo and it will take the entire
game back one step in time, without having to save it. It remembers the state
of the game on every move and can restore it back once. So now it's safe to die. If
you want to jump off the cliff where the sharks are just to see the description—but
don't feel like saving and restoring—you can do so. You jump off, it says you're
dead and gives you the option to Undo. But you can only Undo one move. That
feature won't be available on some machines, like the Apple and the C-128,
only on those with enough memory to support a RAM save on every move.
These are all reasons to get one of these nice machines. People who see this on an
ST are not going to want to play it on any other version. Because it's really nice
on that machine.

QB: Which system will it play best on?

Moriarty: The Apple version contains all the features (except Undo), but just doesn't
look as nice. Aside from that, the gameplay is identical. The ST and C-128
versions look almost identical. The color is different—and by the way, we have
color now—but the screen appearance is much the same. Of course, the ST plays
much faster.

QB: You referred to stats in the game?

Moriarty: I spent a lot of time playing fantasy games like *Ultima* and *Wizardry*,
and one that I particularly liked a lot, *Xyphus* for the Macintosh. And I
realized it was fun to be able to name your character and have all these attributes
instead of having just one number—a score—that says how well you're doing. I
thought it would be nice to adopt some of the conventions from this kind of game,
so in *Beyond Zork* you don't have one score, you have six or seven: endurance,
strength, compassion, love, armor class and so on. Your job in the game is, very
much like in role-playing games, to raise these statistics. And your character grows
as you progress through the puzzles, some of which cannot be solved unless you've
achieved certain statistics. You can somewhat control the types of statistics
you "grow" in order to control the type of character you have. I don't like to call
this a role-playing game, because it's not as much that as other games of this type.
It's still an interactive fiction adventure, but with very strong role-playing
elements.

QB: Is there much combat?

Moriarty: Yes, much more than in any other game we've ever had. That's
another thing we found people like, and something I thought we could do better in
a text-based game than in a graphics game. Because after all, in a graphics
game what can you do with a monster except inflict some damage: His numbers
go down, your numbers go down, and whoever's numbers go to zero first loses.
But in this, well, remember the Thief in *Zork I*? It's that taken to a much higher
level of complexity and with a whole lot more monsters, which are graded in
ascending difficulty. In fact, in this game you actually get to fight grues.

QB: It's about time! What about magic?

Moriarty: Lots and lots of magic. Magic wands as well as the usual spells and
potions, and lots of other weird magic, items. It's not the *Enchanter* series
magic system, with the Spell Book, but more like what you see in *Rogue* or
*Ultima*. It's more that style than memorizing spells as in *Enchanter*.
Frankly I was never a big fan of memorizing spells and then having to
memorize them again when magic was failing; that got a little tedious. So this
is a little more straightforward: You point a wand at someone and something
happens to him.

QB: Did you leave room for puzzles?

Moriarty: There are lots and lots of puzzles, because obviously that's our
forte. A lot of the characters from the *Zork*s and the *Enchanter* games, and
*Wishbringer*, all appear in *Beyond Zork*. And some of the monsters and potions
and magic have their echoes here. It's very much set in the *Zork* universe.

QB: Exactly how does it relate to the other *Zork*s?

Moriarty: I don't like to call it a sequel or a prequel, or even set it in time against
the other games. I prefer to leave that vague. People who play through to the
end of the game may get a sense of where it stands, but I'd rather say now.

QB: What's the plot?

Moriarty: You start as a level zero Peasant in a part of the Great
Underground Empire that is mentioned in several of the other games but never
actually visited—the Southlands. You travel to places like Mythicus and Thriss
and get to visit the Enchanters Guild from *Sorcerer* again. What has happened is
that all the wizards in the land seem to have disappeared. Riots are running
amok, monsters are roaming the streets and you're just a peasant sort of walking
around People start to accost you and send you off on these little missions.
You're also interested in loot, and there are stores where you can buy things,
since if you don't you may die. You'll need good armor if you're headed into a
jungle full of Bloodworms, for example.

QB: Shopping and killing?

Moriarty: Definitely. Shopping and bartering is a very big part of it. This
game has the activities of role-playing and the puzzles of interactive-fiction:
killing and shopping and magic-casting, as well as puzzle-solving and, of course,
reading. Another thing I should mention about this interface is that people who
don't like it can throw it away with one command. Type "mode" and it turns it
into a normal Infocom game. The whole philosophy of the interface is to make it
customizable, so you can use only the features you want, or not use any if you
choose.

QB: Which came first, the idea for the interface or the idea for *Beyond Zork*?

Moriarty: I designed an interface and said "what kind of game would go well with
it?" The game sort of came out of that. And there's a surprise at the end of the
game: It gives you the opportunity to do something that none of our other
programs let you do. But I won't say anything more about that.

QB: When will adventurers be able to go *Beyond Zork*?

Moriarty: The current plan is to have it shipping to the stores in the middle of
October. We hope, with fingers crossed. So it should be out in time for
Christmas.
