<!--
	Title: (Exec) Infocom: Adventures in Excellence
	Author: Roe R. Adams III
	Source: Softalk, v3(2)
	Date: October 1982
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<figure style="max-width: 100%">
	<img style="max-width: 100%" src="/public/img/articles/softalk-infocom-adventures-in-excellence/infocom-staff.jpg" alt="The Infocom Staff">
	<figcaption>The Infocom party. Back row, left to right: Chris Reeve,
		J. C. R. Licklider, Gabrielle Accord, president Joel Berez,
		Scott Cutler, and newest addition, author/programmer Michael Berlyn;
		front row, Zork authors Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, Stan Meretzky.
		The leaders. Clockwise from top: Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Mike
		Berlyn, Joel Berez, and chairman Al Vezza.</figcaption>
</figure>

Nestled in a cozy office complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts, due
west of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the
new corporate headquarters of the legendary Underground Empire, Infocom.
Perhaps embassy is a more accurate description of the facility, as
there is certainly the feeling of stepping onto foreign, even alien, soil.
Impressions of Infocom's several stories overlay and intertwine with the
threads being woven on the loom of reality. Approaching the entrance,
we recall the promise of a special surprise at the end of our visit, and that,
in true *Deadline* tradition, if we keep our eyes open, we might discern
clues as to what that surprise is. Come along and see if you can anticipate
the secret with us.

Upon entering, you find a strangely familiar lamp sitting on the receptionist's
desk. As you instinctively take it along, you notice an attractive
paperweight a sword embedded in a crystal rock. A man resembling
a prospector sits waiting in the lobby, and the sword glows brightly
blue for a moment as we enter the offices. After wending through a series
of winding, twisting passages, we arrive at the Wizard's Den. There is the
Wizard of Frobozz himself, bent over, gazing intently into a black
sphere.

Marc Blank looks up from the Apple and smiles.

## Before the Fall.

To understand Infocom is to return to the pre-Apple
days of the eariy seventies at MIT. As Joel Berez, president of Infocom,
relates:

"We all at one time or another had worked for a research group
that's now part of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT. This
group was strongly result oriented. It was called The Dynamic Modeling
System; now it's the Programming Technology Division.

"We believed it was important to develop programming tools before
trying to develop applications. Over the years we had assembled an extremely
advanced set of tools. Marc Blank lived next door to me when
we were undergraduates and we both worked in this group.

"A dream of the leader of the group, Al Vezza, was that someday he
would bring together all the people who'd been involved with the group
to start a commercial venture using the same techniques that had been so
highly successful. Of the ten founders of Infocom, eight came from the
group.

"We also have three generations of teacher/students here; Dr. Licklider,
in a sense, was Al's teacher, and Al was ours."

Joel Berez sets down the translator, as Marc Blank materializes to introduce
us to one of the cocreators of *Zork*, the Great Implementor himself,
Dave Lebling.

Moving through a door to the west brings us into a large conference
room, where we sit around a shimmering table; everyone avoids touching
the table. Water seems to glisten in an African painting on the wall
where crocodiles and hippos swim serenely. You notice, though, that the
green bubble on the dam upstream is not flashing. The robot in the
corner puts down its apple and, while whistling, serves tea. Strange, your
cup has a slight discoloration in the bottom.

The Underground Empire existed long before Infocom's founding,
so Lebling and Blank relate how they first opened the door to *Zork*; the
background music plays an oldie by the Taylor Mills Road group.

As Lebling explains it, "We had so much fun playing *Adventure* that
when it was all over, we said, 'Oh dear, there are no more of these; how
awful!' "

Blank, officially vice president in charge of product development,
adds that there were some areas where they thought they could improve
upon the original *Adventure*, which had been written in Fortran.

"It really bothered us that if you said, 'Take bird,' it would put the
bird in the cage for you — sort of doing things behind your back. I suppose
it's the nature of computer programmers everywhere to want to
outdo the other person, to be a little better, especially in games.

"There were primarily three of us who worked on the original *Zork*:
Tim Anderson, Dave, and I. In 1976, Tim and I started with an eight-room
dungeon on a PDP-10, written in Muddle, or MDL, which was developed
at MIT in the early seventies as a spinoff of Lisp.

"Then we began thinking of problems to overcome for the adventurer.
The silliest thing in *Adventure* was that you always had to say, Take
ax, throw ax; take ax, throw ax.' So we decided that anything you threw
at *Zork*'s troll, it would eat! A lot of things in *Zork* pay homage to *Adventure*."

## Lebling and Anderson's Inferno.

"We were thinking all along about
an underground world. Tim and I had each read a lot of fantasy and it
struck us as picturesque. We liked the idea that this was going to be like a
book, like a story, so the player can say, 'I can see this world.' So we
spent a lot of time on developing descriptions and trying to make the
world seem more realistic."

That's where Lebling comes in. "I'm in charge of the purple prose;
and I did the geographical design of *Zork I*."

Blank explains how *Zork* came to be *Zork*: "We'd generated this
game with eighty places and five problems, and we didn't have a name
for it. We just put it on the system. We had to have some type of name
for it — files need names. *Zork* was a nonsense word used around the lab
at the time as an exclamation — like, 'Zork, look at that!' The name
stuck.

"We then added direct and indirect objects so we could tell it things
like 'Kill troll with knife.' The parser got more and more sophisticated.
As things progressed, we understood prepositions, we used adjectives,
and we differentiated between objects with adjectives."

By June 1977, the first version of the mainframe *Zork* was finished.
Blank had done the bulk of the work with help from Dave, Tim, and
Bruce Daniels. Daniels is now working for Apple. He had done the coal
mine section in *Zork I* and helped on the puzzle in *Zork III*. During 1977
and 1978, the areas of *Zork II* and part of *Zork III* were added. That
is as far as *Zork* was developed on the mainframes.

How had Blank found time in his hectic, pressure-filled schedule at
MIT to do all this massive work on *Zork*? Says Blank, "Oh, no. I had
graduated from MIT in 1975 with a degree in biology. At the time of
*Zork*'s, development, I was in medical school at Albert Einstein in the
Bronx in New York City." Ah. That explains it. "I graduated from there
in 1979. So how did I write *Zork*, in Boston, from New York? Easy. I
used to drive up every weekend and work with Tim on it. During the
week I would think of ideas to try out. I like biology and was sort of interested
in medicine, but I love playing with computers, and I love games
and programming." Enter Infocom, stage right.

## On Goldfish Pond.

Al Vezza is the Prime Mover of Infocom and
chairman of the board. He still works at MIT full time, where he holds
the impressive title of senior scientist and is currently acting associate director
of the lab. Gazing out a rear window at the aspen trees and the
goldfish pond, Vezza recalls, "Our main objective when we started this
company in 1979 was to use our technology to sell products. At that time
we didn't have a specific product in mind, but my firm belief is that the
way you create new products, with new ideas, is to get a bunch of bright
people, put them in an environment that is stimulating, and let them go
at it."

Over the summer of 1979, Berez told Blank about Vezza's exciting
new venture. Blank suggested that *Zork* was certainly marketable, and,
according to Joel, "Marc and I kicked around the idea of putting *Zork*
out commercially; we designed a machine-independent language for
games that summer." Berez, at that time, was in the Sloane Management
School at MIT earning his business degree. They took the idea to
Vezza, who agreed to let *Zork* be Infocom's first venture.

From the summer of 1979 to the spring of 1980, Blank wrote the
compiler and Lebling wrote the assembler for the new language. Bruce
Daniels wrote the Apple Kernel. During this time, *Zork* for the micro
was being developed independent of MIT on rented space on a DEC-20
from Digital Equipment.

In the spring of 1980, the decision to license *Zork* to Personal
Software was made. Vezza relates why it was not a hard sale.

"We talked to Dan Fylstra from Personal Software about *Zork*.
Turned out that when Dan had been in business school in Boston, he
had played *Zork* on my computer while doing a thesis. So he knew what
*Zork* was all about."

## The Wizard and the Shape Changers.

*Zork* did quite well under Personal's
umbrella, but in the fall of 1981, Personal underwent a corporate
metamorphosis into VisiCorp. The new image involved VisiCorp's dropping
all its game lines and concentrating on business programs, so Infocom
took back the rights to market the *Zork* line. This created quite a
problem for Infocom at first.

During a moment's pause in Blank's narration, you watch a crystal
phoenix being reborn in the air above the shimmering table. Blank continues
the story.

"We've been in business three and a half years, but only one year
has involved marketing under our own name. Last fall we started an incredible
scramble. We had *Zork II* ready, but we didn't know anything
about packaging or advertising. So we got a terrific agency, Giardini/Russell
in Watertown, Massachusetts. In two days they came up
with the *Zork* logo and the manuals — really quick; and we had *Zork II*
out for Christmas. We took our first office last September in the Faneuil
Hall Marketplace in Boston. It was only one room and, in true *Zork*
fashion, required a special key for unlocking the elevator to get up to that
floor. Joel was the first full-time employee and started last July. I came
on at the same time and became full time in January. We now have a
staff of four people and we'll be expanding to ten within four months.
Others, like Dave, have regular jobs elsewhere, working here evenings
and weekends. We moved into these new offices in January."

As Blank shows us around the offices, we notice all of Infocom's
package fronts framed on a wall, including the two new ones, *Zork
III* and *Starcross*. Next to *Starcross* is an empty frame filled with ivy.
Perhaps the ad agency is from nearby Harvard.

## Great Caesar's Muddle!

As we walk. Blank and Berez explain the
Muddle language and why it's so central to Infocom's success.
"Muddle, like us, is a result-oriented, function application language,"
says Berez. "A program is formatted, debugged, and compiled
on a DEC-20 in Muddle, then translated into machine language, which is
interpreted on the Apple. Thus programs are easily transportable between
different machines. Currently, all our programs are available for
eight machines, including the IBM and the new NEC."

Blank adds, "What we've done is design a machine independent language,
which is emulated like Pascal on all the different machines, and
optimized it for doing what we do. It's very compact. For example, on
the mainframe, *Zork I* was about six hundred thousand bytes. That same
game in its entirety is seventy-five thousand bytes on micros. So we get a
factor of eight compression."

Berez then points out, as we step aside for the bear, that "this gives us
a tremendous marketing edge. If you can show us any machine that will
sell a reasonable number of copies, we'll adapt our games to run on it."
The Infocom parser is also a unique and somewhat mystifying tool.
Blank defines a parser as "a module of a program that takes English input
and distills it into smaller pieces of information. The parser has three
outputs. It understands a verb, a direct object, and an indirect object. If I
say, 'Put the brown bag into that trophy case' " (pointing to the one behind
us), "the parser looks at that and basically comes out with three
things: *put* is the verb, *brown bag* is the direct object, and *trophy case* is
the indirect object. Thus, where most adventures are limited to a parser
that can only handle two words, our parser takes full sentences."

## Old Pictures in New Frames.

Blank also explains that *Zork* on the
Apple was quite different in spots from the original mainframe version.
*Zork I* is two-thirds from the original and one-third brand-new, *Zork II*
is half and half, and the just-released *Zork III* is one-third old and two-thirds
new. A black and white checkerboard figure looks over your
shoulder as Blank discusses the depths of subtlety that *Zork* plumbed.

"If you're really in a place that's very foreign, very mysterious, nothing
should be taken at face value. Everything should be explored," Blank
advises. "For example, in *Zork II*, the Oddly-Angled Room was sort of a
joke, like the way Beethoven would write a scherzo. The minuet movement
was a very formal thing, the third movement in symphonies.
Beethoven turned it into a scherzo, which means joke, and did funny
things to a movement that is normally a very rigorously stylized thing.

"We decided, in the same way, that this maze was going to be different.
You," Blank says, meaning us, "think you know how to do mazes.
Here's a maze that you can't map. It's basically to tell people, 'Don't always
think that a maze is a maze.' "

One of the big breakthroughs with *Zork* was the development of
multisolutions to the same problem. The cyclops in *Zork I* could be put
to sleep by feeding him the right food, or, if you ever happen to chance
upon saying *Ulysses*, he would flee from the room. Blank offers a rare
piece of *Zork* trivia. "Do you know that there is actually a clue to saying
*Ulysses* or *Odysseus*. The commandment in the prayer book in the temple
starts off with saying: 'Commandment 29,160 — Oh ye who go about
saying unto each other, "Hello Sailor." ' If you look at the first letter of
each line going down the side, it reads 'Odysseus'!"

## Beware the Fork.

Hearing a mind-curdling scream from behind an
unmarked door, you open the door onto a view of a demonic black temple.
"What's that?" you yell. Blank swiftly closes the door, saying, "It is
not time for you to know."

Somewhat shaken by this vision of blighted evil, we turn for comfort
to a more familiar subject Infocom's revolutionary breakthrough in the
blossoming field of computer novels. *Deadline*.

"*Deadline* was our hardest project yet to implement," Blank comments.
"People moving around — the idea that characters can walk a
path by themselves. You can interrupt them and sometimes change their
future moves completely, like switching train tracks. If you ask them
about something, their answers depend on what you know. If you've
shown them this, but not that, you'll get one answer. If you've shown
them that, but not this, you'll get a different answer. And, if you've
shown both things to the person, you'll get a third, entirely different answer.
If you ask someone about something before it happens, they'll
claim to have no knowledge of it.

"In *Deadline*, things are waiting for you to do something. You are an
active force. It's possible that if you don't do anything in the game, nothing
will really happen. There are thirty different endings possible. The
newspaper headlines at the end convey how close to the best possible solution
you were. When you finally satisfy this very finicky jury, you get,
on the screen, the author's summary of what actually occurred.

"We pride ourselves on anticipating the things people will try to do,
so that there'll be meaningful responses in the game and not just the old
standard 'nothing happens.' *Deadline* is our best effort to date in that regard.
It adds a sense that there is more going on in the game than what
you see."

## This Way to Debriefing.

Lebling rejoins us, the natives having
dropped him off from canoeing on the Charles River. He's excited about
Infocom's first science fiction adventure, *Starcross*.

"Just as Mark is almost entirely responsible for *Deadline*, *Starcross* is
mostly mine," Lebling smiles. "I have always been a science fiction fan
and have wanted to do an adventure in the genre. That's one of the
things I really like about Infocom. We figure out what we really want to
do, rather than design games by market demand. I'm in this to have fun.
It would be nice also for Infocom to make lots of money and be very successful,
but I couldn't work if I wasn't having fun doing it. I love writing
these games — much more than I enjoy playing them.

"*Starcross* was a real joy to write and should be a lot of fun for people
to play. The puzzles are science fiction puzzles, not adventure puzzles.
We did not want to do a 'Zork in Space' game. *Starcross* is intended
as an entry level game for people who like science fiction but who
haven't played many adventure games before."

The airlock puzzle that begins *Starcross* is worth the price of the
whole game for its cleverness of design. Even the packaging of the game
is extraordinary: the disk comes in a large flying saucer that's reusable for
storage — and it really flies. Enclosed is a special color space map and a
detailed manual. The map figures prominently in getting the game
started.

## Let 'Em Eat Disks.

Referring to this and the excellent *Deadline*
package, Berez puts forth the innovative idea that "merchandising can be
a deterrent to piracy. People want all the goodies inside. That's the position
Infocom is taking in the marketplace, in the sense that we're discouraging
piracy by making the add-ons so attractive that people are
willing to pay for them rather than settle for a pirated disk without the
paraphernalia."

The outer door of the *Starcross* suddenly clangs shut and you hear
the airlock recycling. Then the inner door opens in front of you and out
steps the surprise you'd been told to expect a cyborg. Michael Berlyn
lights the room with his elfin grin. Now many of the strange things
you've been seeing and experiencing throughout your visit begin to become
crystal clear.

Sitting in the shade of the two ancient stone guardians of the Underground
Empire, sharing a box lunch, Berlyn tells you of his journey to
Infocom.

"It all started when Marc and I were introduced at Applefest. We hit
it off so well that we decided right there to do a collaboration. Later on it
looked like it would be better to go beyond collaboration and actually
join up with him. I'm very glad to be here."

The future and its promises excite Berlyn. "I have two science fiction
games planned. One is a collaboration with Dave and Marc. We intend
to introduce some brand-new elements into the adventure genre with this
game. I'm also working on a book called After the Change — six hundred
pages long, so far.

"Being offered a position in this company is the pinnacle of my career.
I'm into squeezing and wringing every ounce of energy, experience,
creativity, and application out of myself that I can. I perceive Infocom as
giving me the space, the time, and the opportunity to do just that."
Great excitement reigned at Infocom upon Berlyn's decision to join
them. This was not just a sudden, unplanned happening. Berez explains:
"Since the summer of 1979, we've realized that our whole system lends itself
to the talents of a professional writer. We've wanted to bring in people
who could put most of their effort into writing good stories. Michael
Berlyn — a published science fiction author with computer experience — is
ideal. It's possible that what we're producing will become the novels of
the future, and you're not going to want to read novels written by programmers.
So we're providing new tools for writers to use to get their
points across in new ways."

Blank discusses those tools and Berlyn: "Having Mike Berlyn here is
one of the biggest pluses we have for the future. He's an excellent writer.
He has lots of great ideas for sophisticated games that couldn't be implemented
within the restrictions of Basic. With access to our technology,
he'll be able to develop them. We're trying to extend the concept of the
adventure story to where the player is a character and feels like a character,
a part of the story, and not just like some being solving problems."

<div class="article-sidebar-box float-right">

## BONUS!

**Sleuthing for Spirits**

The winding halls of Infocom seem to be peopled by the spirits
of games. Not only do ghosts from Infocom's own games roam,
but so do some from other games by Infocom's people.

How many allusions to these illusions can you spot?

Be the adventurer to identify the most references—obvious,
subtle, obscure, even punned—and to place each in its real game,
and you'll win the Infocom game of your choice or $25 credit
toward any Softalk advertiser's product.

In case of ties, precision will reign. If there are still ties, the random
number generator will work overtime.

Send your answers to Softalk Ghosts, Box 60, North Hollywood,
CA 91603, by November 15, 1982.

</div>

## What Dreams May Come.

Your lamp flickers; your remaining time
here is short. If we're to learn about the future of Infocom, we must listen
now. Berez complies.

"Al and I have just completed a business plan — about two inches
thick. It establishes where we are today and where we want to go — the
old five-year plan.

"In the future, we'll branch out from entertainment into other areas.
For next year, there are five entertainment programs scheduled.

"One reason we're successful is the broad spectrum of computers on
which our products run and the large installed user base that entails. Yet
our transportability, for all its breadth, reaches only one-third to half of
all the personal computers. The marketplace is growing and hungry, and
our plans are to provide for it."

Your lamp is very dim and you can hear the baying of the grues in
the distance. So, with a last whiff of the Perfect Rose, we bid Infocom
adieu. Marc Blank leads us to a cell and waves as he sets a dial and
pushes a button outside. As we pass through the Great Door, we hear
the Wizard mutter an "F" word, and we leave with a warm glow in our
hearts that will never leave.