<!--
	Title: QuestMakers: Legend Entertainment's Bob Bates
	Source: QuestBusters, v7(11)
	Date: November 1990
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

**After Activision bought Infocom, cancelled ongoing game contracts
and got rid of the in-house designers, Bob Bates, who wrote Arthur
and Sherlock, decided to design his own development system for
adventures. It took about a year, and after he got backing for
Legend, Bates asked Steve "Planetfall" Meretzky to write
Legend's first graphic adventure.**

**Bates:** At Legend, we're betting the conventional wisdom — that the only kind of
adventure game that will sell today is the Sierra-style "move the man around the
screen interface" — is wrong. I feel that the people who used to play Infocom
games are still out there, they're just waiting for someone to give them what
they want. By that I mean puzzles, not just special graphic effects.

**QB:** What kind of puzzles?

**Bates:** They're the kind of puzzles that you think about when you're not playing
the game. Some will be obvious to an experienced adventurer the minute he walks
into a room, but they will grow more difficult as the game progresses, until you
have some real lulus by the end.

But the graphics will be special too. We're using hi-res EGA mode, which is
rarely seen in games. Thal will give us excellent graphics, and we won't be stuck
with 40-column text, which is good because there is a lot of prose in our games.
I've shown *Sorcery 101* to some dealers, who were amazed to hear it used EGA
graphics; everyone thought it was VGA.

**QB:** Will they be interactive graphics?

**Bates:** On the screen there's a text window, a graphics window and a menu. The
player can control what's in the graphics window: inventory, a map, a picture of
the current location, a text description, or his score and other information. When
the picture is in the window, you can click on objects to get things done. A single
click performs a "look" on it. With a double-click, the program will try to do
the obvious thing with the object: a light switch that's off will turn on, a takeable
object is added to your inventory, and so on. You can also pick a word from the
verb list, then click on an object to perform that action on it.

**QB:** The "verb list" interface in most graphic adventures has been very limited.
How did you handle that potential drawback?

**Bates:** We have about 130 verbs all told, and they are accessible to the player
at all times. Seventeen or eighteen commonly used ones, such as take and drop,
are at the top of the list. Below those, in a very easy-to-reach menu, is an alphabetical
listing of all the verbs. My personal belief is that any proficient typist will use
the type-in interface, and that anyone who doesn't like to type will use the
mouse and menus.

But with the menus you can play faster and have fewer opportunities for errors.
If you want to "take the big hairy frog," a double-click on the frog is a lot faster
than typing the phrase. And even if the verb you want to use was not one that
could be executed with a double-click, say you want to "hit the big hairy frog."
Clicking "hit" on the menu and on the frog in the picture is a lot faster than typing.
And let's say you want to "hit frog with 12-pound hammer," you could click
on hit, and the verb menu disappears and is replaced by list of prepositions that
make sense with that verb. That makes it impossible to type in an inappropriate
preposition. And if you pick "hit" from the verb list, then click on the frog in the
picture, the word "with" appears in the preposition list; then you could pick "12-pound
hammer" from the object list. The beauty of this is. that the preposition
menu is hidden until you need it.

**QB:** Tell us about *Spellcasting 101*.

**Bates:** This is Steve Meretzky's story of Ernie Eaglebeak, who longs to win the
affection of his neighbor Lola Tigerbelly. But his evil stepfather Joey Rottenwood
has apprenticed him to shovel dragon dung for seven years. In the first puzzle,
Ernie must escape so he can attend Sorcerer University and learn enough magic
to win Lola's heart (explaining the subtitle, *Sorcerers Get all the Girls*.)

It's filled with the kind of humor Meretzky is known for. At a frat party, you learn
the Skonn spell, which is an "enlarge bust spell." Naturally the player tries it
on every girl he meets, but it never works. It is used to solve a puzzle,
though in a less than obvious manner. You can play the game in naughty or
nice mode. It's sort of like a *Leather Goddesses*, which was criticized because
it teased but didn't deliver — *Sorcery 101* delivers! One location is called the
Island of Amazons in nice mode, but in naughty mode it's the Island of Horny
Women. The story takes place in the world of Peloria, where your travel about
from island to island in the Fizzbuttle Ocean. It comes on nine 360K disks.

**QB:** How about your game?

**Bates:** Mine doesn't have a name yet. The essence of the story is that you're
traveling through time, chasing a villain who is altering history by influencing key
historical figures to do things differently. You've got to set things right. It takes
place from 1361 BC through 1940 AD. If you played my Infocom games, you know
I do historically accurate stuff. In each of the nine time periods you visit, I looked at
six cities, such as Cairo, Peking, Rome and Mexico City. You can go to each of
those cities in each time period, and a specific historical event is connected with
each. King Tut, for example, and (though perhaps controversially) Moses in 1361,
also the year of the first recorded eclipse, and near the end of the time when Stonehenge
was built, close enough that I don't feel bad about including it. Other events
and people include Caesar's assassination, Cleopatra, Attila the Hun's advance on
Rome, Charlemagne, Cortez conquering the Aztecs, the Spanish Armada, and the
signing of the Magna Carta.

With the Spanish Armada, for example, the villain has convinced Sir Francis
Drake to leave the fleet and go to Dover, at precisely the time Drake defeated the
Spanish. Your job is to get Drake to return to the fleet. If you don't, you won't be
able to return to your own time, because history has been altered. Instead, the time
machine shoots you into an altered history in which there's a Spanish-speaking London.
It's like a series of historical what ifs. One of the game's attractions is that you'll
be able to interact with all these historical characters: Churchill, Mussolini and Hitler
in 1940, for instance. And these are the kind of puzzles I like to write: putting objects
in their native environments, but finding unexpected ways to use them. And
the time travel angle lends opportunities for some unusual puzzles. You can go
back into the past and do things that will enable you to solve a puzzle in that location
in the future. That's a really neat part of the game, which is not going to be easy
(though it will be fair).

**Legend's new quests will be for MSDOS with at least 512K, though
640 is recommended. Otherwise, you may lose some of features,
such as the Undo command. They'll support Roland and Ad Lib
and offer Real Sound for people without boards. *Spellcasting 101*
should be out by now, and Bates' game is scheduled for spring.
Amiga and Mac versions are under consideration, but won't be out for
some time even if they do happen.**
