~4 minute readA Zork By Any Other Name
Have you arrested the murderer in our mystery thriller "Was It Murder?" Or found the alien artifact in "Celestus"? Or maybe met a somewhat childish robot in "Lost Planet"? No, those aren't the names of our newest games â- in fact, they're rejected names for some existing ones (can you guess which?). As a player, you've probably taken the names of our games for granted. We didn't. And if you think that writing the games is tough, you should have been there when we named them.
To be honest, some names were easier than others. Zork, for example, was simple, since it was used by some of the founders of Infocom back in 1977, when the game was first written. At that time the only other "adventure" game was the original Adventure, and authors Marc Blank and Tim Anderson were at a complete loss in thinking up a good name for their new game. Since they wanted people to play it, and since you can't run a nameless program, they needed something quick. Blank chose Zork, a nonsense word commonly used at the MIT Lab for Computer Science as an all-purpose interjection. He figured that he would think of something else later, but the name stuck (he never did come up with anything better, anyway) and survives to this day.
As an aside, the original Zork had well over 200 rooms, a vocabulary of nearly 1000 words, and required a mainframe computer with over a megabyte of memory! Infocom's Zork trilogy has about twice the material of the original mainframe Zork in about one quarter of a megabyte. That's progress.
When Marc Blank started writing Infocom's first mystery, he tentatively called it "Was It Murder?" After all, it looked like a suicide. The name was distinctly bland, but nobody around Infocom could think of anything better (give us a break, we had only three employees). We gave the problem to our ad agency, Giardini/Russell (G/R), who came up with the name Deadline along with its distinctive logo.
Dave Lebling gave his science fiction scenario a working title of "A Gift From Space". Nobody's socks were knocked off, so we gave G/R another shot. They proposed five possible titles: Celestus, The Linking, Alien Intercept, Stardate: 2186, and Starcross. Celestus didn't have the right down-at-the-heels image for your ship's name. The Linking sounded too much like a Stephen King novel. Alien Intercept begged for a joystick. And Stardate: 2186 wasn't even good enough for a Star Trek episode. Starcross, however, with its reference to the stars and its similarity to the word starcrossed, had the right sort of feel, and was elected.
We did a little better internally with some of our recent games. Mike Berlyn's Suspended was originally called Suspension (Suspenders, affectionately) for the main character's state of suspended animation, but Suspended seemed to work a little better. Stu Galley's 1930's-style mystery, in which the player is actually present at the time of a murder, led us to immediately think of the title Witness. G/R suggested changing this slightly to The Witness, a title more in keeping with titles in the Raymond Chandler era. Enchanter, written by Blank and Lebling, had its name before it was even started. It just sounded right and its only serious competition was Zork IV. A strenuous argument raged for weeks: was it a Zork or wasn't it. It wasn't.
Planetfall was titled Sole Survivor by its author, Steve Meretzky, and later shortened to just Survivor. When we discovered another game called Survivor, we decided we'd rather switch than fight. G/R went to it again and submitted a list about 30 long, their favorite of which was Lost Planet. Reaction was less than enthusiastic, not the least because it reminded two of us of the TV series, Lost in Space. Blank suggested Planetfall during a long, frustrating meeting â he thought he had seen it once in an SF book as a word meaning arrival on a new planet (much like landfall). Nobody really believed him, but it was never improved upon.
Our first Tale of Adventure might have been called Pyramid. Though uninspired, it was used through the game's initial testing and had a loyal following due to its descriptive nature. G/R was unimpressed and suggested Infidel. Infocom was unimpressed: it sounded more like something from the Crusades than an exploration for a lost pyramid. But in combination with its distinctive logo and the proposed package design, we relented. We even changed the game a bit to make it work better.
That takes us to the present. As this newsletter appears, we will be releasing the sequent to Enchanter, Spellbreaker. No that's not right â I think it's Spellbound. Or was it Sorcerer? I don't know, really. And I don't care. I'm just glad I'm not working on ad copy.
This article appeared in
New Zork Times, The
Jan-Mar 1984
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
