Don't call Infocom a "software publisher." This month's "Inside View" looks at the rather unusual evolution of a staff of game designers and the unique products they are creating.
Take a look at any software best-seller list. Chances are you will see a great number of games that involve gobbling up little dots, or shooting at something that's trying to annihilate you, or working your way through mazes.
There is another kind of computer game that has developed quite a following over the last few years: the adventure game. "We're the only people committed to that sort of game," says Marc Blank, 28, vice-president of Infocom and the programmer behind Zork. "I'm happy to be doing something that no one else is doing."
To date, Infocom has seven products on the Marcet: Zork I, II, and III, Starcross, Deadline, Suspended and Witness. All adventure games. And all successful. "Our adventures are more like books than games." says Blank. "They are a valid form or [sic] entertainment, a new kind of fiction."
This original adventure game was based loosely on the Dungeons and Dragons theme - a fantasy that requires its players to take on the personas of other characters as they engage in an imaginary trek through a castle, seeking treasure and warding of monsters.
The major interaction in this large-scale fantasy game was two-word commands typed in by the players on their own terminals at home and transmitted through a modem over the phone lines. The computer played the role of the dungeon master; it knew where all the treasure was hidden and all the danger lurked, and would execute the players' commands and tell them the results of their actions.
One of the problems with this initial version, according to Blank, was the computer's lack of vocabulary. Because it would accept only two-word commands, the computer made some decisions that would have made the game more challenging had they been left up to the player. For example, you could enter the command, "Open door," and if there was more than one door near you, the computer would decide which one you meant.
Using MDL, a computer language invented at MIT, Blank and some of his acquaintances wrote the original version of Zork on a PDP-10 (a mainframe). Blank had by this time finished his undergraduate studies and was attending medical school at Albert Einstein in New York.
The mainframe version of Zork first became available in June 1977.
Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but decided not to pursue that profession, opting for what he considered a more creative field. He and a few other people spent the next year developing a language that they could use to program adventure games like Zork on the new microcomputers.
Memory limitations of micros forced them to cut the original version of Zork in half. But, says Blank, the new game was actually more complex. It took up about 70k (which does not mean you need a computer with that much memory to play Zork; the program is set up so it calls on different sections at different times).
Blank believes an important element of adventure games is making the players feel like there's no computer there - that they're actually participating in the fantasy. One of the ways this was accomplished was by developing an English language parser that would allow the computer to respond to more than two-word commands.
"An adventure game is only as good as its parser, that part of the program through which the player communicates with the game's enviornment," says Blank. "If the parser gets in the way of the player's creative expression, even the best-plotted game can become slow, tedious, and frustrating."
The original Zork, programmed for the Apple and the Radio Shack TRS-80, had a 600-word vocabulary, which helped accomplish Blank's goal of communicating with the game itself. Later Infocom adventures have even larger vocabularies.
"They're good. Very entertaining." says Blank. "After all, the classics stay in print, don't they? Besides, peoples' imaginations don't go out of style."
Blank doesn't see adventure games as a replacement for arcade games - merely an alternative. "I like arcade games as well as anyone, but a computer can handle much more than games," says Blank. "People like to see themselves as characters in a story. We're committed to giving them those stories."
Thanks to David Jinks for transcribing and donating this article.