When your editor phones you and asks if you'd like to meet someone from Infocom, what do you do? That's right: DROP EVERYTHING. I was out of the front door in a flash. Returning only to retrieve my trousers and pick up a tape recorder, I made my way more sedately to the palatial Hampstead offices of Activision, the company responsible for bringing Infocom to an even wider audience in Britain since they took over responsibility for the range last year. Having discovered that the 'someone from Infocom' was Dave Lebling, the man responsible for inflicting the grue on innocent adventurers everywhere, I considered the possibility of extracting revenge but decided I'd forgive him if he told me where the idea for the revolting creature came from in the first place.
"Yes, I must admit I invented the grues," he said. "The word comes from a creature in a series of stories by a fellow named Jack Vance, who to my mind is one of the best fantasy writers around and grues come from a series of stories about a far future of the earth when the sun is about to go out and magic has revived and there are strange creatures all over, and one of them is the grue. Now the grue that he invented is nothing like the grue in Zork, but the name is so nice, evoking, as it does, buckets of blood and things like that, that I sort of stole it from him."
"Oh yes ... other than eating adventurers, that's all they do. There was a period when there was a grue in every game. Even in Suspect, the murder mystery I wrote, there was a horse named Lurking Grue, but we've abandoned the idea as being a little bit ... well, previous."
Moving from the history of the grue to the history of Infocom, that was dealt with in some depth in a previous issue of Your Computer, and took us as far as the commercial release of Zork I, though that wasn't quite the instant success you might expect with hindsight.
"Zork started slowly," Dave explained. "We were originally distributed by Visicorp, which is the company that also distributed VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, and they sort of had the feeling that, well, this is a very nice game but games were not very exciting at the time, but we've got this spreadsheet program which is really exciting, and I think that's how they looked at things. So Zork started off with what games sold then in the United States when they were introduced, about ten or twelve thousand copies, and that was pretty much what they expected so they weren't terribly interested in pushing it harder so we got the distribution rights back from them and started distributing it ourselves. We repackaged it and because it was our own product we were very motivated to make it a success and it began to pick up from that time. It had got spectacularly good reviews but they weren't always translated into sales, but as time went on we got it onto different machines, and that helped.
"Also, all people had seen then were the Scott Adams adventures and Colossal Cave, and Zork was bigger, more complicated, more realistic, had a better parser ... from a grubby marketing point of view there were a lot of good sales points, and then we came out with Zork II, which helped even more, and of course, we've been turning 'em out ever since."
They have turned out so many in the last twelve months, in fact, that players in the UK may have found it quite a strain on their wallets, despite the lower pricing now in evidence. We have seen Wishbringer, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Moonmist, Ballyhoo, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and now Hollywood Hijinx, followed by the eagerly awaited Douglas Adams game, Bureaucracy. Eight games in a year?
I had wondered if what had seemed like an increased production rate might cause problems in the debugging and checking of Infocom games, as the latest release, Hollywood Hijinx, sports one or two spelling and other mistakes, not normally associated with Infocom products.
"We do check them very carefully, but part of the reason for the spelling mistakes ... I'll tell you this and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to print it or not ... is that the author, Dave Anderson, is a terrible speller. The fact that you've only found two so far is staggering! He's very funny and a very clever guy, but he is not the world's greatest speller. The games do spend many months in testing, both internally at Infocom and with outside testers, and then about a month before the game's ready to be finished someone, and it's often John Palace who is the manager of the Interactive Fiction group and is an ex-editor, reads through the games and looks for spelling mistakes.
"In fact the two in Hijinx, 'renowned' and 'maroading', somebody encountered just the other day before I left. Lately we've been running these marathons where we get teams of students together and they play a game till they finish it. They're very good and tend to start at six o'clock on a Friday evening and they'll play as long as 24 hours. Sometimes they bring tents and sleeping bags, and one of the recent marathons was on Hollywood Hijinx and someone noticed the mistakes there.
"Spelling mistakes are actually pretty rare, but almost every game we've ever produced, we've discovered after the release that there is at least one fatal bug in it. Some of them are enormously obscure, and the average player will never find one, but they creep in and of course we always correct them next time the disks are ordered. We've now gone through five, six, possibly seven releases of Zork including two major renovations. In the most recent one, for example, I upgraded its parser to our current standards of quality, and that's for The Zork Trilogy package."
"We have a program that goes through looking for frequent words and compresses the most frequent into a single character. Another program goes through looking for frequent phrases, like "Only an idiot would try to...", and the program ranks them according to how much space combining every instance of each phrase would save. I think we spend far too much time trying to make characters work better."
But is there such a thing as the ultimate parser?
"Well, we, talking now, are the ultimate parser, but in computer terms I think to parse as well as humans, a computer would have to be truly artificially intelligent. However, to parse much better than existing parsers parse, I don't think a computer would have to be that much more clever than it is now. We're working on better parsers. I know Magnetic Scrolls, who I went to see today in fact, are working on better parsers. There are lots of people looking at ways of making games more realistic in that way: better parsers, better characters, better thieves, better trolls and things like that. We have a good friendly rivalry going with Anita Sinclair and Magnetic Scrolls. We'll make helpful comments like: 'You call that a parser? It's nothing but a stinking heap of ...' But The Pawn is the most Infocom-like game I've seen, and they do very nice stuff."
It's not just the quality of Infocom's adventures that sets them apart from any of their rivals, though, but also the packaging that comes with them. Who could resist the Scratch 'n Sniff card from Leather Goddesses, the genuine piece of pocket fluff in Hitchhiker's, or the signed photo of Uncle Buddy in Hollywood Hijinx, the movie director responsible for such classics as Vampire Penguins?
"Well the first packaging of Zork was just the disk and the manual, very prosaic, and the first one that had really exciting packaging was Deadline, the first murder mystery we did. We had seen some things by Dennis Wheatley, I don't know what sort of books you'd call them, but they had clues, transcripts, all kinds of fun stuff in them, and I think it was Marc Blank seeing those things that motivated him to write Deadline and so we got the idea that it would be fun to have interesting stuff in our packaging too. It was such a success, and partly for that reason as well as being a good game, that the next time we did a game we thought, well, we can put some other keen stuff in it, and so we've just made a habit of it.
"Sometimes, also, it incorporates anti-piracy elements, things like the wheel in Sorceror that is hard to reproduce. The little details add to our fun, too, we spend a lot of time sitting round saying 'What should we do?' We had enormous fun coming up with the gossip paper in Hollywood Hijinx, it's totally bizarre. Actually our own criticism of it was that it wasn't outrageous enough, it wasn't that much more bizarre than a real gossip paper."
The only Infocom game so far that has been an adaption from another medium has been The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I wondered if this was the start of a trend or whether Infocom games would always be original adventures.
"As for any books we might do in the future, I have to give our stock answer to that which is that we don't publicise products more than about six weeks before they're released. But having said that, the obvious next thing would be The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and there's always the possibility that that might happen. I had dinner with Douglas last night, in fact, and we talked about lots of things, including his new novel, of which he alleges to have just actually finished correcting the galley proofs yesterday, and he was at last free of it. He looked a tad haggard."
"What's in Bureaucracy? What isn't in it? It's got the Zalagasan National Airline, it's got Rambo-like paranoid schizophrenics, it's got your bank, it's got Ronald Reagan and Mr Gorbachev, it's got llamas, it's got the Boysanberry Computer, it's got the Zalagasa User's Group on the Boysanberry Computer ... it's a very very strange game and is hard to describe, much harder than Hitchhiker's and imagine trying to describe that. With that game you could say: 'Well, it's sort of like the book, except different.' With Bureaucracy you could say: 'Well, it's sort of like the book of Bureaucracy except different and there isn't a book in the first place.'
As if eating adventurers wasn't bad enough! Dave Lebling, what have you done?