<!--
	Title: Booted Up Any Good Books Lately?
	Author: Charles Adai
	Source: Electronic Games, v3(4)
	Date: April 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<img style="width: 100%;" src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/trillium-games.png" alt="A banner showing Trillium game titles based on books: Fahrenheit 451, Rendezvous with Rama, Dragonworld, Amazon, and Shadowkeep">
<img class="float-left-wide" src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/electronic-book.jpg" alt="Artists rendition of a book with an electrical plug">

Until recently, interactive fiction seemed to be getting
rather stagnant. After all, every company has already gone through
the tried-and-true adventure game themes of medieval battles
between wizards and dragons, hard-boiled detective stories, treasure seeking a
la Indiana Jones in perilous old temples and ruins, and science-fictiony searches
through futuristic, but deserted, planets, asteroids and spaceships many times over;
things seemed to be getting rather repetitive. Once in a while a really original game
would appear, but that was a rare occurence. There's no question that what we
needed was an influx of new ideas.

Finding new ideas was harder than it sounds -- even Infocom's **Planetfall** and
**Enchanter** were -- as far as their plots were concerned -- basically rehashings of old,
used concepts. It quickly became evident that companies would have to start looking
outside the market for a source of originality. And so, in a fit of inspiration, or
perhaps desperation, several companies simultaneously cast their eyes upon their
bookshelves.

The decision to make adventures games out of books should not come as a surprise --
players of *Dungeons & Dragons*-type role-playing games have been doing it for
years. Books are wonderful as sources of imaginative escapist entertainment, but
too often readers fall into the "I would have done it differently" syndrome. By
their very nature, books make readers observers of, rather than participants in,
any action that they depict. Only by converting a book to a more interactive format,
like a role-playing game or a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" type
book, can a reader truly take part in the events detailed within its covers.

However, both formats have problems. Role-playing games almost always require
two or more players. "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" books are very limited, lacking
both the element of human interaction and the overall complexity found in a full
role-playing game. What's more, such "interactive books" are much too open to
unintentional cheating.

<img class="float-left-narrow" src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/robots-of-dawn-cover.jpg" alt="Robots of Dawn cover">
<img class="float-right-narrow" src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/dragonriders-of-pern-cover.jpg" alt="Dragonriders of Pern cover">

Computer adventure games may not yet be able to duplicate human interaction, but
the best of today's technology comes pretty close. Certainly, computers can easily
mimic the complexity of a role-playing game, and they never allow a player to
see the solution to a puzzle before he has found it for himself. The connection was
made: What better way to boost the adventure game industry than to take
ideas from the boundless imagination of books?

Obviously this train of thought, or one very similar, has been passing through the
minds of a number of game designers and industry executives, since over the past
few months various types of book-based adventure games have been turning up on
the market at a tremendous rate. Epyx was one of the first to enter the field with
**Dragonriders of Pern**, a strategy adventure based on the bestselling sci-fi series by
Anne McCaffrey, and **Robots of Dawn**, a futuristic whodunnit mystery game converted
from the novel of the same title by Isaac Asimov. Forthcoming is a second
Pern game called **Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern**, also being released by Epyx. Infocom
recently released a **Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy** adventure, based on the
hilarious cult classic by Douglas Adams. Quicksilva's **The Snowman** has its roots in
a novel by Raymond Briggs. And, of course, the entire Wyndham Classics and
Telarium (nee Trillium) lines of adventure games are based on famous books or were
written by will-known authors.

The Telarium games are unique in that they depend more heavily on input from
the authors on whose books they are based than do the games made by most
other companies. Seth Godin, Telarium's founder, explained the company's unusual
practice of giving the writers an opportunity to play a major role in the creation of
each new game. "These games are very much like movies and books because they
are both visual and literary," he said. "We wanted to go to the people who could
write that the best. And that's not programmers -- it's authors."

<figure class="float-right-wide">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/adams-and-meretzky.jpg" alt="Pictures of Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky">
	<figcaption style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">Author Douglas Adams and designer Steve Meretzky of the infamous <em>Hitchhiker's Guide</em>.</figcaption>
</figure>

Infocom followed a similar policy when Adams approached them with the idea of a
*Hitchhiker's* game. They gave him a free hand in writing the general story and the
various encounters, and had ex-science fiction author and designer of *Planetfall*
Steven Meretzky write it into an adventure game format. The results of this unique
collaboration can be seen throughout the game, which is filled with Adams' very
distinct sense of humor. Not only does *Hitchhiker* play well, but it reads well,
too. As an experimental way to design an adventure game, *Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy* is a success.

A different point of view is held over at Epyx, where talented game designers and
programmers were the ones to create both Pern games and *Robots of Dawn* with little
input by the authors whatsoever. According to Robert Votch, a representative of
Epyx, Anne McCaffrey did meet with the programmers to discuss and offer suggestion
for both Pern games, the second more so than the first. In addition, she approved
the final versions of both games. Still, most of the actual design work and programming
was done without McCaffrey's presence.

However, compared with the amount of input that Isaac Asimov had in the *Robots
of Dawn* game, Ms. McCaffrey's might as well have written both Pern games
single-handedly. Mr. Votch reported that although the licensing agreement was
made through his publisher, Dr. Asimov did participate in the design of the game
through a set of guidelines that he sent in to Epyx. Dr. Asimov contends that he hardly
even knew of the game's existence until a copy of the finished product found its
way to his home -- a copy he couldn't even try out since his computer, which he
uses for word processing, is a TRS-80.

Would Asimov be interested in actually writing a game some time in the future?
"Not really," he says. "If it were earlier in my writing career, maybe. But as it is, I'm
too busy with my writing to start any other projects." (At a rate of about one book
every three weeks, Dr. Asimov is one of the nation's most prolific authors.) And his
opinion of computer games in general? "We are faced with a new technology, and
as always, we must accept the products of that technology."

<figure class="float-left">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/anne-mccafrey.jpg" alt="Anne McCaffrey signing books">
	<figcaption style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">Anne McCaffrey, whose sci-fi books are the basis of two games from Epyx.</figcaption>
</figure>

New technology did indeed play a major role in the creation of these new book-games.
Only a few years ago, an adventure was considered complex if it contained
more than a dozen rooms. Now, recent leaps in technology have made
possible complex adventures with over a hundred rooms, like Telarium's **Rendezvous
with Rama**, a suspenseful game which takes place in a gigantic space complex.
Telarium's other games are relatively massive, too; Ray Bradbury's **Fahrenheit
451**, a sequel to the acclaimed, world famous novel, is set in a futuristic New York
City with a total of seventy key locations to wander through, and the more traditional
**Dragonworld** whose medieval city of Kandesh includes sixty accessible areas.

Similar technical advances have made animated graphic sequences and background
music are not only a reality, but a standard feature of many adventure games.
The Telarium and Wyndham games, for instance, all boast outstanding graphics
and wonderfully atmospheric music.

Byron Preiss, head of Byron Preiss Video Productions, worked on the production of
a number of Telarium games including Robert Heinlein's **Starman Jones**, Bradbury's
*Fahrenheit 451*, *Rendezvous with Rama*, for which author Arthur C. Clarke
wrote a brand-new surprise ending, and *Dragonworld* which he co-authored as a
novel with Michael Reaves. In discussing the games, he explained why it is so much
more difficult for an author to write an adventure game than it is to write a novel.

"[When writing an adventure] you have to anticipate a heck of a lot more, to
understand the consequences of the characters' actions in more than one way. When
you do a book, you can just say, 'Okay, this is how it is going to happen, and that's it'.
When you do a game, you have to realize that someone can do many different things
in any given situation. You have to pre-guess the players so that the events you
put in seem logical."

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/clarke-and-preiss.jpg" alt="Photo of Arthur C. Clarke with Telarium game designers">

On the flip side of these problems, celebrated writer Alan Dean Foster, author of
countless move novelizations and the popular *Spellsinger* series (the fourth
volume of which, *Perturbations of the Perambulator*, is being released soon), was
faced with some rather unusual difficulties in writing a novelization of the Telarium
game **Shadowkeep**. The game is a hybrid of **Wizardry**-style action and a typical
adventure game scenario, which involves saving a mythical world from destruction
at the hands of a menagerie of evil, demon-controlled monsters. The problems
that arose came partly from the fact that, because players are allowed to create their
own characters to use in the game, the game script that Foster was presented with
was sorely lacking in characterization and plot development. In addition, he was
faced with the dilemma of having to write the book without revealing too many of
the game's secrets.

"This is the hardest book I've ever had to write," said Foster. "I had to describe the
game in relation to my characters and the story, without really describing the game. I
had to make it work as a novel without giving everything in the game away. On
the other hand, I couldn't change things, because I didn't want to do anything in the
book that would directly contradict the game."

*Shadowkeep* is not the only Telarium game that was not actually preceded by a
book; **Amazon**, written entirely by author and filmmaker Michael Chrichton, has no
literary ties other than those of its author, whose credits include the screenplay to
*Coma* and the novel *The Terminal Man*. *Amazon*, with its highly animated, movie-style,
fast-paced game sequences, is easily Telarium's most innovative game. Actually,
all of the Telarium games are innovative as each one experiments with its own
unique graphic and prose styles.

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/byron-preiss.jpg" alt="Byron Preiss">

The Wyndham Classics line of games is similar in general style and presentation to
the Telarium line, both being subsidiaries of Spinnaker Software. The major
difference between the two is that Wyndham games are intended for young children,
and so stray less from the texts that inspired them and are easier to solve. The
Wyndham library includes **The Wizard of Oz**, **Under the Root**, **Treasure Island** and
**Robin Hood**. In a similar vein, Quicksilva's *The Snowman* is also targeted at a young
audience.

All in all, book-based adventure games are still in an experimental phase. New
concepts are always arising, and changes are constantly being made. The continual
evolution of the field can already be seen in the increased involvement that authors are
having in all stages of game design -- Ray Bradbury even write the packaging blurb
for the *Fahrenheit 451* game.

What's ahead for this new breed of adventure game? For Telarium, the answer
is simple: more author input, more animation and music, more characterization and
character interaction, but fewer typical adventure game situations and fewer logic
puzzles. "The games that are being designed now," says Seth Godin, "don't
have any logic puzzles in them at all. In the next generation of games, staying in
character is more important than anything else . . . we're constantly reinforcing in the
games the character that you have to play, and by doing that, we make the player
identify with that character more strongly. The ending [to *Fahrenheit 451*] is such a
climax that people have called us saying that they were in tears at the end -- and
the reason that they were is that we forced them to believe in the character that they
were playing."

For Infocom, the *Hitchhiker's* game might have been a one-shot deal -- even
though the game does end with the definite promise of a sequel. (If you've got the
game and don't want to wait until the end to find out about this, try typing,
"CONSULT GUIDE ABOUT MAGRATHEA.") The only impediment to the creation of a
sequel involves the game's authors; Adams, having just finished the fourth
*Hitchhiker's* book, a *Hitchhiker's* movie screenplay and this game, may want to
take a break for a while. Meretsky might want to try his hand at a different type of
adventure, but even if he does want to stay with science-fiction comedy, he already
has a commitment to making a sequel to *Planetfall*, an adventure which many gamers
feel is Infocom's best.

On the other hand, even if no second *Hitchhiker's* game is forthcoming, there's
no reason for Infocom to give up the entire field of novel-based games; there must be
plenty of authors who would jump at the chance to write an adventure with them.
Though Infocom has announced no such plans for the immediate future, making
more book-games is something that they should consider. After all, their first
attempt was a success, and there is no reason to doubt that future attempts would turn
out as well.

<figure class="float-right-narrow">
	<figcaption style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">Michael Crichton, author and designer</figcaption>
	<img src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/michael-crichton.jpg" alt="Michael Crichton">
	<figcaption style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">All of the Telarium games are innovative as each one experiments with its own unique prose and graphics style.</figcaption>
</figure>

Another entrant into the field is Synapse Software, a company long known for its
arcade adaptations and popular games like **Blue Max**, whose new line of games
consists of what it calls "electronic novels". Twelves of these unusual text adventures
are under development, the first bunch of which are titled **Mindwheel*, **Essex,
Brimstone** and **Ronin**. These games, while not actually based on books, are written by
authors; in fact, each game comes with an incomplete hardcover novel which
introduces the player to the story and the characters of the game. Also unusual is
that these games are focused around character interaction and conversation rather
than intuitive reasoning and logic.

The scenarios of the games are also unique. No more dull, mundane dragon
slaying -- the Synapse games are really original. *Mindwheel*, for instance, sends
the player into the minds of a rock star, a general, a poet and scientist in search of
the information necessary to receive the *Mindwheel* and save the world. *Essex* has
the player caught up in interstellar intrigue, forced into services as a messenger who has
to give a secret document to the captain of a giant space world, a task complicated by
the fact that the "world" has a population of 65,000 and no one seems to know
where the captain is. *Brimstone* is another tale of intrigue, though this time the game
takes place in various countries on Earth, a true international feel created by having
foreign characters speak foreign languages. *Ronin* places the player in the
midst of Japanese feudal society. At press time, no information was available about
their fifth game, whose working title is *Breakers*.

Each Synapse game was written over a period of a year by a design team of the
author and two programmers. *Mindwheel* and *Essex* were written by Robert Pinsky
and Bill Darrah, respectively. As for other companies, other authors
and other games, only time will tell. The Wyndham production calendar includes
computerized versions of Jonathan Swift's *Gulliver's Travels*, Jules Verne's
*20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*, and Kenneth Grahame's *Wind in the Willows*.
Harry Harrison, who used to be a commercial artist before becoming famous for
science-fiction novels like *Make Room! Make Room!*, just finished writing
and illustrating a game for Telarium called *Starsmashers and the Galaxy Rangers*. Also
scheduled from Telarium is a game based on Roger Zelazny's *Nine Princes in Amber*.

However, as far as their long-range plans are concerned, few companies are
eager to divulge any secrets. For the most part, the industry's sentiment is echoed in
Seith Godin's cryptic comment that, "we've got a few things up our sleeves."

<figure class="float-left-narrow">
	<figcaption style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">Book-based interactive fiction is a whole new field that has taken the adventure gaming industry by storm.</figcaption>
	<img src="/public/img/articles/eg-booted-up-any-good-books-lately/robots-of-dawn-book-cover.jpg" alt="Robots of Dawn book cover">
</figure>

Speculation as to the nature of those "few things" leads one to wonder just
what the future holds for book-based adventure games. Perhaps, as Alan Dean
Foster advocates, the games will be packaged together with, or at least sold along
with, the books that inspired them. Hopefully, the games will branch off into other
genres besides science-fiction and fantasy; a mystery adventure by Mickey Spillane or
Michael Innes, for instance, would surely have an audience, and play an adventure
dreamt up by Piers Anthony or Stephen King would certainly be a unique experience.

The future will probably see descendants of these games being used for
educational purposes, maybe even to help children learn to read. Already the games
that are available today are exposing computer users to books that they might never
even have looked at under other circumstances. In fact, some universities are already
using Infocom adventures in remedial reading courses. All adventure games
encourage reading, and gamers who would otherwise hardly give a book like *Fahrenheit
451* a second glance may be tempted to read it after playing the adventure.

Book-based interactive fiction is a whole new field of computer software that has
taken the adventure gaming industry by storm. These games are entertaining,
sophisticated and intellectually stimulating, while at the same time being exciting
and fun to play. And though one can never predict anything with certainty in the constantly
changing computer industry, it seems that these games have a bright future ahead
of them. If nothing else, these games have given new meaning to the phrase
"computer literacy."
