<!--
	Title: The "Hard Boiled" School of Software
	Subtitle: It's hot, dry, and dusty. You're playing an Infocom game. You look for graphics. They're not in the picture.
	Author: Eric Grevstad
	Source: Family Computing, v2(6)
	Date: June 1984
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<img class="img-center" style="max-width: 80%;" src="/public/img/articles/family-computing-hard-boiled-software/hard-boiled-title.png" alt="The Hard Boiled School of Software">

*You might pick up an Infocom game for
its distinctive packaging* — Starcross *comes in
a plastic flying saucer;* The Witness, *a 1930s
private-eye thriller, includes a newspaper
and matchbook as well as a floppy disk. But
the Cambridge. Massachusetts, company is
best known for unparalleled programming.
And for publishing games that use absolutely
no graphics, just text.*

Zork, *written by MIT graduates Marc Blank
and Dave Lebling, revolutionized the
adventure-game genre by letting players use
complex sentences instead of two-word commands.
Other games that use* Zork's *600-word
vocabulary and sophisticated parser (the part
of an adventure game program that interprets
input), such as the interactive mystery* Deadline
*and sci-fi comedy* Planetfall, *have made
Infocom the leading adventure publisher, and
a more than $6-million-per-year business
enterprise.*

FAMILY COMPUTING *went to Infocom's offices to
interview Blank, now Infocom's vice president
for product development, and Michael Berlyn.
author of several novels and Infocom's futuristic
smash,* Suspended. *The firm had just released
its ninth and tenth games* — Enchanter,
*the first in a trilogy of fantasies in the* Zork
*tradition, and Berlyn's* Infidel, *a tale of drama
set in the Egyptian desert.*

**FC:** How did *Zork* come about? I know *Colossal
Caves*, Will Crowthers and Dan Woods'
original adventure, was sweeping through
computer labs in the mid-'70s. Did it sweep
through MIT's?

**Blank:** Yes. *Colossal Caves* was the only
adventure around. So after we played it and
liked it a lot, we asked. "Why don't we do some
thing like it?" So *Zork* was first written at MIT
on a big mainframe computer.

The old *Zork* was very small, with just a two-word
parser. We realized that was really very
limiting, so we expanded the parser [so it could
understand longer sentences] and invented
new problems. Eventually *Zork*, between 1977
and 1979, got really, really large. It was just a
hodgepodge of different sorts of things; when
ever anyone had a good idea for a problem, we'd
add it.

When we put the games on micros, especially
*Zork II* and *III*, we tried to give them a plot,
which the original didn't have at all.

**FC:** So now plot comes before problem.

**Blank:** That's exactly right. There's a plot,
and then we say, "Well, what are the problems
going to be?" In *Deadline*, for instance, we
said, "Okay, the story is this, and this guy's
dead, and these people are going to do this and
that. Now, what's the game, what are the
pieces of evidence and what can you do?" With
*Suspended*, I think the characters came even
before the plot. You had these different robots
with different abilities....

**Berlyn:** The setting, the underground complex...

**Blank:** And then the question was: What are
they doing?

**Berlyn:** Always a good question.

**Blank:** But you can see that the newer
games are really all much better thought out.
People that play them, I'm sure, will notice that
they hold together much better. And it's because,
even though they're changed a lot after
the initial design, they're designed at one
time — as opposed to over years by a number of
different people with different interests.

**FC:** How does the design process work?
What's the first step?

**Blank:** Someone who's finished with one
project says, "I have an idea for this story." If
it's something that we all think sounds reasonable,
then they can come up with a synopsis
and see if we like that; then they can go off and
start. And as they're doing it, there's a lot of
feedback from the other authors.

**FC:** There seems to be as much interaction
here in the office as in the games. What's it like
to work here? Is it a bunch of off-the-wall loonies
playing around the water cooler?

**Berlyn:** For the most part, yes.

**Blank:** I think we're actually a bunch of relatively
well-behaved loonies. I mean, we're loony
enough to do what we do, but not so loony that
we don't get things done. We understand that
we're in a business.

**Berlyn:** Were professional loonies.

**FC:** I'm getting the impression of fun-loving
game writers who are also serious business
men. Who's your competition?

**Berlyn:** Hemingway?

**Blank:** Actually, we're our own competition
at the moment, because we're internally driven
to do something better or new each time.

<blockquote class="float-right" style="font-family: var(--article-sidebar); border-left: 1px solid var(--dark); padding-left: 0.5em; color: green; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">
"AGATHA CHRISTIE WROTE ALL THE MYSTERIES
THAT ANYBODY NEEDED TO WRITE."
</blockquote>

**Berlyn:** All the loonies who write the games
are easily bored, and no one wants to sit down
and recreate what's already been created.

**FC:** People say the market's changing. Who's
your audience? Is it male, female, professional,
young, old?

**Blank:** Whenever anyone docs a survey, you
can look at it and say, "Oh, we have a very
limited audience — young, college-educated,
male, with incomes over $40.000." Then you
look at the type of people who own computers
and they're the same. You're really not getting
any extra information: the question is. who
owns computers?

**Berlyn:** We get letters and warranty cards
from 10-year-olds, 50-year-olds, male, female,
married, single. There's no way for us to say
that no women like our games, no children can
play our games....

**Blank:** Actually, it looks like a relatively high
percentage of women play our games. The
male/female ratio of computer owners is some
thing like 10 to 1 or 15 to 1. For our games,
it's more like 6 to 1.

**FC:** That brings up another point. You've
been careful lo have generic or nonsexist characters —
the role you play in *Deadline*, for instance,
is identified only as "The Inspector."
But now, with *Infidel*, the protagonist's not
only a man, but an obnoxious, unscrupulous
one.

**Blank:** We didn't really have a choice on
that, although all things being equal we
wouldn't have wanted to do it.

**Berlyn:** The character had to be drawn the
way it was in order for the story to work properly.
We discussed at great length whether or not
having a male character would interfere with
any female player. The thing we kept coming
back to is that women watch TV shows where
men are the main characters, they read books
where men are the main characters, and men
do the opposite.

**FC:** What do you think your customers
want? What are your most and least successful
games?

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/family-computing-hard-boiled-software/starcross-packaging.png" alt="Starcross packaging">

**Blank:** *Zork* and *Deadline* sell well. They're
often the first games like this [text adventures]
people play. *Starcross* doesn't sell as well as
*Zork*; is that because of the package, or because
it's science fiction?

**Berlyn:** Or because of the weasel aliens?
There's no way of knowing.

**Blank:** But we hear the same sorts of things
from people that like all the games. They like
the interactive nature of it. they like the stories
and the puzzles, they like the attention to detail.

But, it's like owning a bookstore — you don't
take science fiction off the shelves because people
buy other kinds of books.

<blockquote class="float-left" style="font-family: var(--article-sidebar); border-right: 1px solid var(--dark); padding-right: 0.5em; color: red; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">
"PLANETFALL MADE SOMEONE WHO WAS PLAYING IT CRY.
DID ZORK DO THAT?"
</blockquote>

**FC:** One of your new games, *Enchanter*, is a
fantasy like *Zork*, but one in which you use
magic and cast spells. Is it fair to say you're
taking on *Wizardry* (the role-playing adventure
from Sir-tech Software]?

**Berlyn:** Not in any way, shape, or form. It's
nothing like *Wizardry*. They don't look alike,
they don't act alike...

**Blank:** *Wizardry* is for multiple players,
multiple characters, the role-playing thing. It's
mostly fighting and gathering treasures. It's
similar because they're both fantasies.

**Berlyn:** They're similar in the way that *Pac-Man*
is similar to *Zork*. They're both games.
And they're a little more similar in that they're
both fantasies. But when you're a publisher of
this kind of fiction, do you say "We shouldn't
publish a fantasy, especially if there's spells in
it. because that's been done in *Wizardry*?" We
certainly don't. If we did, we'd never have done
*Deadline* or *Witness*. Agatha Christie wrote all
the mysteries that anybody needed to write.

**Blank:** That's true. It's a different view of
magic, too, I think. We're trying to build a
progression. At the end of *Zork III* you become
a magic user of sorts, so we thought it'd be nice
to change the theme a little. So instead of being
an adventurer, who just wandered into this
crazy place, you've just graduated from magicians'
school. And in *Sorcerer*, the sequel to
*Enchanter*, you're a member of the circle of
enchanters, and something's happened to the
leader, and you go off and look for him.

**FC:** You've stressed the progression from
game to game within a series, but $50 is a lot
to pay for a game you play once.

**Blank:** If you can play the game only once,
but play it for 30 hours and enjoy it, that's
better than a game you play for two hours and
then get sick of.

**Berlyn:** Books are expensive. How often do
you reread a book? Also, some of the games
you can play again and try to do better.

**Blank:** My guess is the average person who
finishes a game has seen about half of what's
there.

**FC:** That brings up the question of detail.
You can read all the bottles in the medicine
cabinet in Deadline; you can jump on the bed
and it says WHEE! How do you second-guess
people as to what they'll try to do?

**Blank:** Mostly, we write for ourselves, but
we do spend a lot of time with testers seeing
what they do. We definitely try to anticipate
things: if there's a bathroom, you say, "Hey,
someone's going to try to flush the toilet."
That's more a frill, not really important to the
story. But it's important to making the world
we're creating a little more real.

**Berlyn:** You begin *Infidel* in your army cot
in your tent; you can fold up the army cot and
carry it around with you. That came as a result
of a tester saying. "It's an army cot. Army cots
can be folded up." Now, some people say they
want to be able to strip the cot of the canvas,
boil it in water, and eat the canvas. But that's
irrelevant to the story and unreal.

**Blank:** But something like waving at the
plane may be relevant to the story, because you
may want to be rescued.

**FC:** Even though it just dips its wings in reply
and flies off.

**Berlyn:** Oh, you tried that?

**FC:** Some graphic adventures get more detail
by using multiple disks. Would you consider
doing that?

**Blank:** We'll have larger games. If in the
future we're trying to do something ambitious,
the "next thing," we may need to go to multiple
disks. That's something that we're working on.

**Berlyn:** But it's not going to be a *Zork* with
a glandular problem. We won't make a game
bigger for the sake of making it bigger.

**Blank:** The larger the game is, the more it
has to go to disk, the more disks you have to
swap — the more tedious the experience.

**Berlyn:** You're not going to want to play an
exciting, interactive game where your next
move may be life or death, and have to wait 15
seconds for swapping disks.

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/family-computing-hard-boiled-software/infidel-packaging.png">

**Blank:** The idea is to make the computer
invisible. You don't want to know you're dealing
with a computer. You want to be interacting
with the story, and anything that gets in
the way, having to swap disks or communicate
in two words, detracts from the experience.
The full-sentence parser doesn't improve the
story; all it does is make it easier for people to
get through to the story and interact with it.
It's just a device, like a nice keyboard as opposed
to a crummy keyboard.

**FC:** Here's a hostile question. I think *Zork*
and *Deadline* and *Suspended* were like nothing
anyone had ever seen before, great leaps or
innovations, and I'm not sure I get that feeling
from your new games. You have another trilogy
like *Zork* [*Enchanter*], another mystery [*The
Witness*], another science-fiction game [*Planetfall*],
and so on. Aren't you playing it a little
more conservatively?

**Berlyn:** Not at all. *Infidel* has things in it
that no other game has ever had.

**Blank:** It's got an ending that...

**Berlyn:** Don't mention the ending.

**Blank:** Well, I'll say something about it. It's
the only game I know of where the ending is
not a happy one, and in a way, you should have
expected that from who you were, from your
character. I think its really revolutionary, because
when people are done with it, they're
going to think a lot about what's been happening.
That's a little unusual. You know, it's not
like you've gotten the last treasure and won the
game.

**Berlyn:** It's the first game that's ever drawn
the character clearly and in great detail, and
then set that character out on a mission, and
had an ending that is more consistent with
literary conventions and reality than with a
game. And for that reason it's less a game and
more a piece of fiction. So I disagree that *Infidel*
doesn't make any breakthroughs.

And look at *Planetfall*. *Planetfall* is the first
story where I saw someone who was playing it
cry. There are people who are really touched by
that game. Did *Zork I* do that? And there are
other things in *Planetfall*, too. Doing different
things takes different amounts of time.

**Blank:** Which we were playing with. I mean,
that's an experiment — the fact that taking
something is quicker than walking from one
room to the next, and that walking down a long
corridor takes more time than walking down a
short one.

**Berlyn:** And there are fewer suspects in *The
Witness* because there's more that you can talk
to them about. More interactions with the
characters are possible. Those kinds of things
may not seem as radically different as *Zork* did.
but there are still minor breakthroughs with
every game.

**FC:** Are there any major breakthroughs left?

**Blank:** I think in a year we're going to see
something that is to *Deadline* what *Deadline*
was to *Zork*.

<blockquote class="float-right" style="font-family: var(--article-sidebar); border-left: 1px solid var(--dark); padding-left: 0.5em; color: steelblue; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">
"THE LARGER THE GAME IS, THE MORE IT HAS TO GO
TO DISK, THE MORE TEDIOUS THE EXPERIENCE."
</blockquote>

**Berlyn:** The new game changes the type of
game; it doesn't just improve on an existing
genre. What *Zork* was was *Adventure*, done as
full-blown as it could be done — a full-sentence
parser, and a big vocabulary. And *Deadline*
changed what detective games were like — with
characters that move around independently,
whose lives you can affect, with time flowing
through the story and with things happening
whether you're there or not. The new game will
be out early next year. Our kids' game [due in
May] will also be very different.

**FC:** *Time* magazine
[featured you](/library/time-computers-putting-fiction-on-a-floppy)
in the December
5 [1983] issue, and said a lot of nice
things about adventures and *Zork I*'s being the
best-selling piece of recreational software [sales
have now topped 250.000 copies]. Then they
said, "By literary standards, Infocom's stories
are crude. The characters are two-dimensional,
plots are forever clunking to a halt, and the
writing tends to be sophomoric."

**Berlyn:** That's very true. By "literary stan
dards," 99 percent of the fiction published in
the United States is crude, it's sophomoric. I
won't argue with the *Time* quote. It's entirely
accurate — and very unfair. Unfair, in that to be
compared to "literature" at this point shows
their total lack of understanding.

**Blank:** It's flattering that they think our
work is close enough to literature to say that. I
mean. I don't think they would bother comparing
*Wizard and the Princess* to literature.

**Berlyn:** We're not upset by it.

**Blank:** We're going to put stickers on our
packages that say "Crude! Clumsy!" — *Time*
magazine.

---

<div class="smaller">

ERIC GREVSTAD *is the news editor of* 80
MICRO. *He wrote "The Lure of Adventure and
Fantasy Games" in the October issue of* FAMILY
COMPUTING. *He has never found the safe in*
Deadline.

</div>