I definitely, playing the Infocom games, I definitely knew that that was the
the epitome of a text adventure. That was, it was written by people who knew how to
write, they knew how to design a game. It wasn't, you know, kind of thrown together,
cobbled together. It was very professionally done, so I knew that every
time an Infocom game came out, it was going to be extremely high quality.
I knew I was going to get probably the same presentation, the same kind of, you
know, the scoring system and the way the text was on the screen and everything.
I knew I was going to get that, but, you know, what was in it was very different,
you know, every time. And I played, I played a lot of the Infocom adventures,
and I didn't, I only finished, you know, maybe five of them, something like that.
I finished Zork 2, I finished Wishbringer, which I loved, Wishbringer.
And surprisingly, I finished Spellbreaker, which is an expert level one,
without any help. That was, that was just plugging away, but that was a really
great game. I think I finished Sorcerer, and, you know.
What gave you the opportunity to work with Infocom?
When I started working with Infocom, I had just left a startup of mine called
Inside Out Software, and, wait a minute, wait a minute. I actually, actually, here
we go. When I started working with Infocom, I was at a startup of mine called
Inside Out Software, which was located in, in Londonderry, New Hampshire.
And at Inside Out, we were doing a lot of different ports of games.
The biggest one being the Might and Magic 2 titles that we'd done on the Commodore
and on the IBM, and I think the Amiga as well. And we started to, you know, we
wanted to do some original contracts, and we wanted to, or we wanted to do some
original games, and so we were looking for some possible development contracts.
And so myself and my co-founder, John Faschini, had, John had some contacts at
Infocom, so we went down to, to Cambridge, and to the Infocom offices, and we
talked to them about possible projects that we could work on, and it was
interesting. The projects, we actually worked on two projects at once for
Infocom at the very beginning. One of them was called Time Sync, which was a
game that Brian Moriarty was working on, but then he decided to leave Infocom
and go work on Loom at LucasArts. This was in 1980, I think it was 88. And so we
took on, we took on Time Sync to do, it was being developed on Mac, or yeah, it
was being developed on Mac. We were putting it on the PC. Our job was to
actually redevelop the game on the PC. The PC market was starting to really take
off. And then surprisingly, the other project that we were working on was a
version of the movie Aliens. We were doing Aliens on the PC. And so we
started on the project and continued going down the road. And we had hired
other people to develop these projects. And then when Epix canceled the project
that I was working on, to me that was like, you know, they canceled everything
on the Apple II at that time. And I saw the end of the 8-bit Apple II era, that
was it. It was over. And I decided that rather than stay at inside out and kind
of make the burden a little bit harder for everybody there, because we didn't
have any other upcoming contracts, that I decided that I needed to just fully
jump into the PC development industry immediately and not try and kind of
figure it out slowly. I needed to just jump into it. So I left inside out. And
one of the people that I had hired at inside out, a friend of mine, we both had
left inside out. And then we formed a little company together called Ideas
from the Deep. And because we'd already been talking to Infocom, we went back
and talked to Infocom some more. And in talking to Infocom another time, Lane
and I, his name is Lane Roth, Lane and I got a contract to do the operating
system on the Apple II for the latest of Infocom's four adventures that they were
making, which was Arthur, Journey, Shogun, and Source Zero. And so we did the
Apple II operating system, which needed to be very small, needed to fit in 4K of
RAM. And so Lane and I both split up part of the operation of the writing of
that code. And we did it, it was pretty quick, it was under a month.
So it was that one piece that ended up getting used across it. So that was your
main interaction. Other than the other two games. Other than the other two games,
it probably never came out. I don't think they ever came out. Right, because we
have all the internal Infocom assets that somebody gave it to me. That was
awesome. And one of the things we found was a fully finished game of The Abyss.
I mean, you sound pro them. Hell yeah, oh yeah, they're awesome. So that's easy.
Yeah, it was interesting, if you look back on, or when I look back on the
Techs Adventure era, they definitely went through a definite interesting
phase. I think that, you know, Techs Adventures created adventures. The
success of Sierra and all the other games companies back then had adventure
games, those came from the Techs Adventure era. So, you know, a lot of
people owe everything to Techs Adventures. In fact, today, if you look at
companies that are creating, say, the Sam and Max Adventures, Telltale Games,
they create a lot of titles. That's all part of the whole evolution of where
Techs Adventures started. And, you know, I played so many of those things back
then, back from the full Techs Adventure, that's all you got, you know, even
adventures even, which were all techs. And then movement towards graphical
adventures, where you had, you know, four lines of text, and then you had the
graphics up there, and then Sierra's kind of interesting hybrid with King's
Quest, where you kind of have some text and use a joystick to control the guy on
the screen, and Trillium slash Telerium, where, you know, they did Amazon and
Fahrenheit 451 rendezvous with Rama, where they had, you know, this cool
hybrid of graphical adventure with text, and then there were action scenes that
were, like, replaying those parts of the books, you know, shifted into, you know,
arcade on the screen kind of action. Very interesting to see that whole
evolution. But when you look back at it, it still got more, way more
satisfaction out of Infocom's games than any other of the games, because of the
writing, because of the depth of those games, you know, your imagination is so
much more than what you can put on a screen. And, you know, that was
definitely a golden age, and, you know, that was back, that was the 80s, and then
the 90s was, you know, real, you know, computers have horsepower, and we shift
into graphics, full graphics mode and no text. And, you know, that was a big
change. And I still think that there's definitely a place, there's definitely a
place for that kind of writing somewhere. And, you know, I think a lot of it is
just the writing of how some of the later games like Bioshock, just writing
those games. You know, you don't actually see the text, but you kind of feel the
text. Where we're trying to create these interactive environments that are
highly action oriented, but also have a sense of depth, which is all based off
of writers really writing these things. So I don't think it's totally gone away,
but it definitely did have its time.
Okay. All right.
Hell yeah, that isn't going to ruin the call. The first time I encountered, the
first time I encountered a text adventure, I was, it was 1979, and I was at
Sierra College in Rockland, California. And a friend of mine, I was basically
addicted to arcade games back then, and a friend of mine had just come back from
Sierra College going nuts saying, oh my God, there's games up at the college and
they're free. And when you're a little kid, you know, 11 years old, 25 cents, you
know, that was, you know, that was a lot of money actually back then. So I
jumped on my bike, we all rode back up to the college, and when we went in there,
we saw all these terminals connected to an HP 9000 mainframe in the next room,
and you know, a bunch of college students, and they're all on the computers,
and some of them that are playing games. And I remember seeing Poison Cookie on
one, and Hunt the Wompus on another one, and then the one computer in the corner
that everybody was crowded around was running this text adventure, which was
adventure, Claspave Adventure. And that one was really interesting because that
looked like a real game. And because of that, when I started learning programming
right after that, the first type of game that I made was a text adventure because
of adventure. What was that text adventure? It was a dungeon. The theme of
the text adventure was, you know, it was like a dungeon crawl. There was a bunch
of rooms. I was basically just trying to be able to move between rooms, just
learning how to use variables and print stuff to the screen and have some kind of
program flow. And it was not, the adventure did not get very long because I
was having to put them on punch cards because I didn't have an account. So I
had to save them on something, paper tape or punch cards. And I was doing them on
punch cards. And after I had about, I think it was like 300 cards, which is
like there's a line of basic per card, I was going home one day and the cards all
fell off the back of my bike into a bunch of water. And I was like, done. I'm not
using cards anymore. I'm going to wait for disks because I knew that the Apple 2
was about to get a disk drive. So I never actually got much time on adventure
because it was locked to one guy's account somehow. Like he had the
permissions on his time chart account. So Saturdays at seven in the morning was
when everybody came up to the college to watch this guy play adventure. So that
was where I basically got my exposure was watching somebody else play. I wasn't
able to actually play it myself for a while until it came out on the Apple 2
when Microsoft published the Apple 2 version.
So, Scott Adams games?
Yes, I played Scott Adams games. Those were my, I played Scott Adams games
before I played Infocom games. Scott Adams games were 20 sector binary
programs and they were, you know, the text descriptions were not very long. But
it was, you know, it was really nice. I mean, I played other adventures on the
Apple 2 after Scott Adams and they didn't have the same quality mostly
because most of them were not written in assembly language like Scott's were. A
lot of them were just written in basic. But Pirates Adventure was the first non
mainframe text adventure that I started playing and I believe I totally finished
that one.
Yeah, those were a little easier to solve.
Yeah, those were easier adventures to solve. I played a lot of Scott Adams games.
I never did play the Savage Island ones but I did play a lot of those. I played a
lot of the early Sierra games like Wizard and the Princess. There was Mission
Asteroid, Cranston Manor. I'm trying to remember how many of those high-res
adventures they did.
They did Time Zone.
Time Zone. I didn't play Time Zone. That was a lot of discs. 12 sides.
Time Zone is the phantasmagorical one there.
Are there any that were your favorite?
I think Whispering was probably my favorite one. It was a really easy one but
what was interesting was I loved the way that when you go into the Witch's Magic
Shop kind of thing at the end of town and you come back out the entire world is
changed. I liked that game so much that the map that came with it that you fold
out and everything, I actually drew a copy of that whole map so I could write
on it. I didn't want to mess up the original map so I actually just kind of
re-drew the whole thing. Then I made a bunch of copies so I could just, if I had
to write on it, I could write on it. It was interesting. It was interesting. I
loved that game. It was really fun.
What?
Yeah, not really.
No.
It was almost anti. It was the opposite of where, when creating a game like
Doom, the focus is entirely, we're making a game that was supposed to kind of
rely on base instinct and the UI disappears and there's just no thought.
It's just pure reaction. That is very much the opposite of what Text
Adventure is, which is very sit there and you think and you puzzle over stuff.
You try and figure out where things are, keep track of what you have. All these
very, very heavy thought process on a Text Adventure and when we created Doom
many years later, it was really completely opposite kind of play style,
which is great. The fact that you can do that on a computer was very
interesting. You can have a really intense interaction on a computer in
multiple different ways. One where you're trying to be very thoughtful and just
stare at the screen and look at the letters and try and understand what they
mean and try and pull some other meaning out of those sentences and then have
another intense experience where you're just high on adrenaline, fear, running,
shooting, totally different thing. It's funny, when we were designing Doom and
coming up with switches and key cards and puzzles and stuff, we were not
thinking back to other kinds of games that we had played like, oh, we need to
copy this kind of thing. It was kind of an evolution of what we had been doing.
If you go back before that, when we created the Commander King series of games,
they were totally inspired by Mario. They were Mario clones almost, but they
were more involved than Mario because Mario was a game that kind of pushed you
through it. It was constantly scrolling and you had to keep up with it. When we
did our Commander King games, we had the scrolling, but we didn't have the
pushing you through. Because we weren't pushing you through, we were able to
actually put puzzles in there like pick up a gem here, put it in a gem holder,
open a door, find a card, put it in the door. We actually developed that
puzzly, get through the door paradigm back in our Commander King days. Then
when we moved up to Doom, it was just natural to use those same kind of
puzzles in 3D. It worked out when we put them in there. The game felt right.
It felt like, this is interesting. It makes people fully explore the
environment, not just rush through and not see everything. Hey, let's hide some
stuff, make them look for it. That was a good thing, but it wasn't the
Commander King era when we had put those puzzles in there to open doors. It
wasn't harkening back to Tex Adventures because Tex Adventures actually had
much deeper puzzles than just find a card and open a door kind of thing. There
was a lot more to those.
A couple of the others were doing work. I don't know if you met any of them.
I didn't get to meet any of them. In fact, I think Steve Maretsky was in the
office when I was up there talking to them. I've been up there a couple of
times. I think that he was up there probably each time that I was there, but I
never did ask to see, hey, are any of the implementers around? Unfortunately, I
didn't get to meet him back then.
Is there anything that you remember? Did you have a producer?
No. When we were writing the Infodos, we called it, there was no
producer on that because it happened so fast. We knew what we were doing. We'd
written this kind of stuff before for years. The development of that OS went
really quick. When we wrote it, we didn't know what it was going to be used for,
but we knew that they needed it. They said, we need this operating system. It
gets more games coming. They use it more in memory than the older games. We want
to actually have an operating system that we can use like ProDOS that has
file names and it has setting prefixes and using multiple volumes on the Apple
TV, et cetera, not a hard-coded, what you call an RWTS function, which is just
reading tracks and sectors. They wanted something that was much easier to
program and in smaller memory. It was very easy for us to write this. We did
not know what it was going to be used on, so we had no idea.
You mean for Infodos?
Well, yeah, and any of the Infocon products. Did you end up with the name on them?
I don't know if they actually did that, but if you boot up any of those four
games, you hold down both Apple keys, our credits come up. It's a little Easter
egg. In fact, I have a photo on my photo sites and there's also, if you do a
search for Infodos, you'll find a whole thing on just that whole Easter egg.
Someone took a screenshot of the Easter egg thing, but I actually have disk
images of those games. You can do the same thing. Hold down both Alt keys on
the PC and it'll pop up.