<!--
	Title: Zorked Again
	Subtitle: Lost in computer fiction
	Author: Bill Barol
	Date: 23 December 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<figure class="float-left-narrow">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/newsweek-zorked-again/amfv-cover.jpg">
	<figcaption><strong>Playing out fantasies:</strong> <em>Adventure by Infocom</em></figcaption>
</figure>

Across America tonight, computer-game players will slip floppy discs
into their machines, and their screens will fill with ... *words*. Not jerky bits-and-bytes
stick figures. Just words, firing imaginations to flight -- to the Great Underground
Empire, where Lord Dimwit Flathead once ruled; to a dead planet
where a galactic plague has wiped out every living thing except a robot named
Floyd; to an Egyptian temple deep below the burning desert. The front-office glass at
Infocom in Cambridge, Mass., where these programs are written, bears a sticker reading
"Imagination sold and serviced here."

With 18 games on the market and four on this week's authoritative Softsel Hot List --
including Zork I, now marking its 169th week in the Top 20 -- Infocom is an industry
leader in the text-only branch of computer gaming called "interactive fiction." The
player is the central character in each story, and to a large extent determines how
the action unfolds. At the start of Zork I, for example, you are in a field near a house.
What next? Choose your own path. You may want to explore a bit first ("Go east,"
"Climb the tree") or go straight into the house ("Open the window," "Enter the
house"). After each move the game answers back with a detailed explanation of
where you are and what you can "see." Over the next few days or weeks (play time
per game can run to 100 hours) you'll explore a vast underground cavern, solving
puzzles and accumulating booty along the way -- and trying to avoid electronic death.

There are others writing and distributing interactive fiction.
Simon and Schuster recently issued a game based on "Star
Trek"; Adventure, widely considered the seminal work in the
field, has slipped into the public domain and can be played
on The Source data base, an electronic information service
available to home-computer owners. But Infocom is the class
of the field. Its games are cleverly written, beautifully packaged
and punctuated with a sharp sense of humor. In fact, it
was frustration over the primitive, stodgy Adventure that got
the company started. In 1977 a group of MIT computer jockeys
got the idea of trying to go Adventure one better. Over the
next few years, recalls Joel Berez, now 31 and Infocom's
president, Zork was their "midnight project."

The result was an instant hit on the MIT campus -- and, via
the Arpanet data base, across the country. It was clearer and
funnier than Adventure -- when a frustrated player types in any of several well-known
obscenities, for example, the game responds, "Such language in a high-class
establishment like this!" And its breakthrough programming
enabled players for the first time to enter complicated
commands in plain English ("Climb down the cliff and jump into the river"). The
group founded Infocom in 1979, thinking they'd issue the game commercially and score some
fast money to bankroll business software.

**Losing sleep:** It was six years before the company finally
introduced Cornerstone, software to help nonprogrammers
organize business information quickly and easily. In the meantime,
the games simply took over. Zork begat Zorks II and
III, then mystery games, science-fiction games and Tales of
Adventure, each selling for between $35 and $50. A stable of
in-house writers grew; today there are six. A devoted cult
following grew, too -- mostly male, a third of them teenagers,
another third in their 30s. The seductive power of Infocom
began to spread. People began to lose sleep. Conversations
like this were overheard among computer owners: "I went to the garden and got
the key. Then I went to the Carousel Room, and southwest to the Cobwebby Corridor.
But I couldn't get past the lizard and unlock the door. What do I do now?" Says Berez,
"We originally thought these games would just appeal to cultists, fantatics. That was
true. But the cult following got a whole lot larger than we expected." Last year sales
topped $10 million.

This fall the company introduced the first in its Interactive Fiction Plus series,
A Mind Forever Voyaging. Plus games require 128K of memory, twice that necessary
for regular Infocom games; that limits the potential audience somewhat, but
gives the writers twice as broad a canvas on which to work. In AMFV, writer Steve
Meretzky has used the expanded memory to breathtaking effect, creating a richly
imagined anti-Utopian futureworld. "I wanted to do something that was more of a
story and less of a puzzle," says Meretzky. "And I wanted to make a political statement,
which hadn't been done in this medium before." To a very large degree, he
succeeded. AMFV isn't "1984," but in some ways it's even scarier. Players wander
the streets of a South Dakota town in the year 2041, not really sure what they'll
find or why they are there. And then ... well, have fun. But don't mess with the
Border Security Force. And be sure to get home before dark.