Twisty Little Passages

by Nick Montfort

  As with other interactive fiction, when considered only as a narrativegenerating program, without considering the activity of the interactor in generating those narratives, Nord and Bert is uninteresting. The interaction that can transpire is certainly intriguing, however, and not only because it brings the parser out of the realm of typical adventure-game actions. Nord and Bert also provides a much more symmetrical exchange between interactor and computer than is found in other Infocom works. For instance, in the Buy The Farm segment, when the player character finds a sow's ear, the interactor can solve a puzzle by typing make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The computer's reply begins "After working your fingers to the bone . .." The interactor and computer are trading cliche for cliche, just as in other situations the interactor participates in the formalized conversation of a knockknock joke. This makes for a more equitable situation for the interactor than does the typical adventuring exchange, in which the interactor types things like n. e. x window. and the computer provides detailed descriptions in reply. The exchange is less like a command-prompt interaction-in which, for instance, a two-letter command might result in a lengthy directory listing, and somewhat more like a normal conversation between people. Of course, the interactor has almost no choice in what to say in the situations described earlier in Nord and Bert. There is essentially only one set of responses that allow the game to be solved. Still, the sort of symmetrical interaction provided in Nord and Bert could potentially be used as a model for a work in which the interactor had more genuine agency.

  Another Infocom work in the humor category, also set in a quotidian world rather than a fantasy or science fiction one and also published in 1987, is Bureaucracy. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams is credited as Bureaucracy's sole author, although one Implementor writes that it was completed "by a cast of thousands including Douglas Adams's friend Michael Bywater, Tim Anderson, and others" (Lebling 2002). This work, like Nord and Bert, features a waitress opponent. Its plot is advanced as the player character overcomes bureaucratic challenges, eventually discovering that a malicious hacker is the main obstructing force. The challenges are unlike the typical adventure-gaming puzzles in some ways, but not as much of a break from the usual format as was the nonrepresentational wordplay in Nord and Bert. It is not enough for the interactor to key in appropriate puns, the player character in Bureaucracy must actually be directed to act, although sometimes absurdly. One reviewer called Bureaucracy "the standard by which almost all tongue-in-cheek games about real life are measured" (Cree 1995).

  Infocom's only publication in the spy thriller genre was the 1987 Border Zone, by Blank. Border Zone, set in the fictitious Eastern European country of Frobnia, is divided into three chapters that can be accessed in any order. The interactor commands a different character in each. Another unusual feature of Border Zone is that time in the IF world continues to pass even if the interactor does not type a command. Time in the IF world is advanced in other Infocom works only by typing a command and pressing the return key; only such an input moves the simulated world's clock forward. In Border Zone time passes while the interactor is thinking about what to type. This had been done previously in four 1985 works by Synapse which are discussed in the next chapter; the technique added some special urgency to Border Zone's spy-thriller interaction. It also required the interactor to puzzle through situations many times, getting killed and restarting or restoring the game perhaps even more often than is usual.

  The underwater adventure Seastalker by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence, released in 1984, was a work in the juvenile fiction genre, Infocom's first "junior-level" game. The interactor could name the main character in Seastalker, providing his or her own name, for instance. Seastalker came with floor plans (as did Deadline) so that children interacting with it wouldn't have to map out the game on their own.

  One of Infocom's most popular publications was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This work, which Steven Meretzky and Douglas Adams created in collaboration, is discussed in the next chapter, in the context of other interactive fiction based on print books. James Clavell's Shogun by Dave Lebling, the only other Infocom work based directly on a book, is also discussed there. Although not a direct adaptation, Infocom's Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels featured characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. It was written by Bob Bates in imitation of Doyle's prose style, and it stands as a well-crafted late Infocom work. (Bates had founded Challenge, Inc., to compete with Infocom, and began working for Infocom in 1986. He went on to found Legend Entertainment, discussed in the next chapter.) In Sherlock, the interactor directs Watson, who conducts the investigation while being trailed about by Holmes. The puzzles presented in Sherlock do require Watson to pilfer objects in a way more appropriate to the player characterplunderer of Zork than to Holmes's friend, though.

  The last canonical Infocom work was Arthur: The Quest fir Excalibur. Although it included graphics, they were optional and the game could played from start to finish in text mode. Arthur, like Sherlock, centered on a famous character from British literature, and it was also written by Bob Bates. The sophisticated interface (used only in this Infocom work) allows the interactor to switch among a view of the current location, a textual description of that location, a map of the surroundings, a report on the state of the player character, and a listing of the player character's possessions. The player character, the young Arthur, gains the interesting ability to change into different animals. He needs this ability because the animal forms endow the main character with different capabilities, not because a new type of perspective can be gained by seeing through an animal's eyes.

  Arthur's setting included an underground maze with a novel lateral-thinking challenge: The player character, transformed into a badger, is unable to carry objects about and use them as tokens. Instead, the badger-Arthur must scratch the walls to distinguish one room from another.

  According to the manual, the young Arthur's goal is to "earn the wisdom, experience, and chivalry points" to prove to Merlin that he is ready to ascend the throne. Doing this involves the usual puzzle solving and object collection, however, only some of which is relevant to the particular virtues named. Even the subtitle of the work emphasizes that acquisition of a talisman is the main point, after all.

  Infocom had foundered in 1985 after venturing into business software. Although it seemed reasonable to use the cross-platform Z-machine for business purposes, Infocom's relational database, Cornerstone, came to be called "tombstone" or "our worst game" (Masterson 1986) by the Implementors. Interactive fiction revenues essentially funded its development. The product shipped in January 1985, selling fairly well, but not well enough to make up for the very high cost of development. The layoffs started that September. By February 1986 Infocom was desperate to unload the blue "lunchbox" packages of Cornerstone, and dropped the price from $495 to $99.95. Then Infocom itself went on sale. On June 13, 1986, the video game company Activision, then under CEO James Levy, bought Infocom for $7.5 million. An extensive report later chronicled Infocom's decline as a business (Briceno et al. 2000).

  A series of late Infocom-branded publications, the Infocomics (which are not interactive fiction as discussed in this book), have features that suggest a different model for narrative interaction in text adventures. Infocomics were comic-like works with crude graphics, developed by Tom Snyder Productions. Some used settings and characters from Infocom's text adventures, while one, Gamma Force in Pit of a Thousand Screams, used an original story line. The Infocomics were available for computers-such as the Apple II, with its six colors-which had very limited graphics capabilities even by late-1980s standards. These works allowed the user to view different narrations of the same story. The user had to choose which character or group of characters the narration would follow at different points. Although the stories and graphics were of no interest, the interface concept, which did not involve any manipulation of the events in the narrated world, was somewhat novel. It may ha
ve been an influence on some later interactive fiction along the lines of Exhibition. By the time Infocomics appeared, Bruce Davis had succeeded Levy as Activision CEO and Infocom was in its twilight.

  At the end of the 1980s, what was left of Infocom-now located at Activision's California headquarters-had stopped producing text adventures. Some software made by other companies was marketed using the Infocom brand, including the graphical game Mines (f Titan. The brand was about all that was left of Infocom by 1990. The former corporate Shakespeare of interactive fiction had no existence separate from its parent video game maker. Some of Infocom's intellectual properties were used by Activision in graphical games during the 1990s. Three graphical Zork revivals were produced during that decade, as previously mentioned. Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X was another graphical Activision/Infocom release, designed by Meretzky, creator of the original Leather Goddesses of Phobos. A graphical Planetfall game was also begun and a demo video clip was released on the Web, but the project was never completed. On a happy note, by releasing collections of Infocom's interactive fiction-first in the two-volume Lost Treasures ofIufocom (on floppy disk for PC and Macintosh) and later on the dual-format CD-ROM Masterpieces o_f In_focom-Activision has done a great deal to keep Infocom's works available to the public.The company has also been supportive of independent efforts to develop interactive fiction, a form that clearly no longer has the sort of commercial viability it did during its 1980s heyday.

  Numerous companies sought a piece of the U.S. market that Infocom dominated, and companies in other countries sought to cash in on interactive fiction abroad.The works that resulted during this commercial era varied tremendously in terms of what they aspired to be and to what degree they attained those aspirations. Although it was possible to list the canonical publications from the most important American company, Infocom, and to give a sense of the creative breadth of all the work done there, this chapter focuses instead on the most important remaining companies and on their specific creative efforts.

  The most visible change in the commercial era of interactive fiction came early on. In 1980 Ken and Roberta Williams founded On-line Systems (later called Sierra) and released Mystery House for the Apple II. This piece of interactive fiction, originally called Hi-Res Adventure, was a minimal, bizarre treasure hunt with a two-word parser so primitive it made Adventure seem as intelligent as HAL from 2001. Mystery House was notable, however, because it was apparently the first adventure game to show graphical representations of different rooms and objects alongside (or, to be literal, up above) the usual text. The pictures were spare green-on-black line drawings, placed on the screen line by line as each room was entered. A special graphics mode on the Apple II left room for four lines of text beneath such an image. In the first room of Mystery House, seven people are initially seen. The player character begins to find them dead one by one as the house is explored.They are shown as little more than stick figures, and the prose is just as sketchy: "YOU ARE IN A SMALL BEDROOM. THERE IS A DEAD BODY HERE"

  Still, Mystery House sold 10,000 copies (Meier and Persson 2002), helping Sierra succeed and defining a noticeably different form of interactive fiction. Dozens of companies created adventure games that combined a few lines of text at the bottom with an image of the current location. Many of these were better to look at than to read, and many were not even particularly pleasant to look at. Interesting works did follow the example of Mystery House, though. One was a demonstration program for the IBM PC Jr. that Sierra developed, with an animated avatar situated in a similar sort of illustrated text adventure. The player character, visually represented in this way, could be directed to walk around using the keyboard or joystick.This was Roberta Williams's King's Quest (1984), which turned out to be much more successful than the IBM PC Jr. on which it first ran. It led to several series of similar graphical adventures for Sierra. Eventually the text was omitted entirely in these sorts of works, and the mouse alone was used to control the player character. This is the format of the later Sierra works and of the excellent, witty productions of LucasArts, but the purely graphical adventure is another story altogether. In 1990, celebrating ten years in business, Sierra officially released Mystery House for free distribution, setting a precedent that only a few other companies have followed.

  While some U.S. companies published enjoyable text-and-graphics interactive fiction, the ones that could stand alongside Infocom's better works of this sort (Zork Zero and Arthur) were mostly developed abroad. Companies that became adept at working in this format included Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls, both based in the United Kingdom and discussed later in this chapter. First, it's worthwhile to look at one notable text-and-graphics interactive fiction work from Australia, since it was also part of another trend, that of converting novels into IF works.

  In Australia, as in the United Kingdom, the typical 1980s home computer was the Sinclair Spectrum. This machine, released in 1982, had 48k of RAM. That was an improvement over the first Sinclair, which offered only 16k, but it did not match the more capacious 64k of the Commodore 64 or of the Apple Ile that would be introduced the next year; these would quickly become typical computers in the United States. Moreover, the Spectrum ran programs from cassette tape rather than disk, which was the typical storage medium for a C64 or Apple Ile. Melbourne House, founded in 1977, catered to Spectrum users, first as a book publisher and then as a developer of software-and most notably, interactive fiction. In 1983 the company brought out Philip Mitchell's The Hobbit, which was a hit despite its many bugs. The Hobbit was one of the earliest commercial works of interactive fiction to be based on a book. It, like Lord, was inspired by a J. R. R. Tolkien book. The puzzles were at times obscure and would require knowledge of the book; the major incidents in Tolkien's novel were the direct basis for the situations of the IF work. (This would turn out to be the case often in interactive fiction that was "converted" from print fiction.) The Hobbit had graphics, drawn on the screen a line at a time, as in Mystery House, but they were in color, and noticeably less primitive. The non-player characters could be commanded to do things, and in fact such commands had to be issued to successfully traverse The Hobbit. The parser, a system called Inglish, was purportedly sophisticated in that, as one reviewer noted, "the analyzer ... takes the input through several checks that ensure that the words are in the program's vocabulary, that the syntax makes sense in the game's context and that they make sense in the context of the game's development to that point" (Mangram 1984). If in fact the system added sensitivity to the progression of the generated narrative (not just to the state of the world and the immediate surroundings), it would be admirable, but much of this description applied to any contemporary interactive fiction parser. According to Mangram,"Mitchell has remarked on the fact that with the flexibility built into the The Hobbit, players still tend to under-use it, sticking to the verb-noun form." The parser's inability to understand simple commands like look at the door probably contributed to this underuse, although this work did, still, offer fewer frustrations than many competing titles. Despite being buggy and not nearly as capable of language understanding as a contemporary Infocom IF work (available only on more powerful computers), The Hobbit was a standout in the text-and-graphics category and became quite popular.

  Other companies began creating interactive fiction based on the writings of well-known authors of different sorts, again, not involving those authors themselves. One creation of this sort that worked fairly well was the all-text Robots of Dawn, published in 1984 by Epyx. The setting and situation of the novel was easily transposed into an IF world and the initial situation of the work. The player character was to investigate a murder on a planet in where people found it distasteful to actually meet one another; furthermore, people lived very far apart and the player character was an agoraphobic. Hence it was natural that an isolated, depopulated area would make up the world of Robots of Dawn. The company Angelsoft adapted Stephen King'
s novella The Mist into an IF work with the same title, published in 1985perhaps a surprise for those who thought that King's first electronic publishing venture was The Plant. It incorporated the text of King's story in a straightforward and, at times, even effective way. Angelsoft's parser did not advance the state of the art significantly, but it did manage to recognize some very unusual inputs simply by matching them against keywords. Some of the company's other titles-which all came out around 1985-featured James Bond and Rambo as player characters.

  Perhaps the company most fervent about turning well-known books into interactive fiction works was Trillium, known as Tellarium after 1984. Their titles included Fahrenheit 451 (1985, by Len Neufeld and Byron Preiss), Rendezvous with Rama (1984, by Ronald Martinez), and Nine Princes inAmber (1985, by multiple authors)-based on books by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Roger Zelazny. There is little evidence that any of these books' authors had much to do with the development of the Trillium/Tellarium titles, although Bradbury was quoted as saying he was "thrilled to be participating in the evolution of my Fahrenheit 451 into a computer adventure" (Meier 2002). Some Trillium/Tellarium works integrated arcade-like games at different points-although the term "included" is probably more appropriate, as these did not fit into the overall work very well. They also incorporated graphics that, within a single work, would appear in different configurations by the text: sometimes with the two elements laid out side by side, sometimes with the text atop the graphics.