Meet "Hollywood" Dave Anderson

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Recently we had the opportunity to chat with "Hollywood" Dave Anderson, author of HOLLYWOOD HIJINX. He started as a tester and then moved on to manager of testing and finally to author with this, his first piece of interactive fiction. Instantly recognizable in his flamboyant Hawaiian floral shirt, Dave is a native Californian who was on home ground for the occasion of an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds" in Los Angeles. (The Marathon is a competition among teams of high school students who work straight through the night attempting to solve an unreleased Infocom game. In next month's issue we'll take you to the scene of the Marathon of the Minds for "Bureaucracy," which was held February 28 to March 1 in Los Angeles.)

CE: Where did the idea for HOLLYWOOD HIJINX come from?

Dave: Way back in high school, I used to write sort of joke movie reviews, based on take-offs of titles of current movies. I was looking for some kind of a pull, some kind of frosting for this tory. I had all the puzzles, but I wanted an excuse to be funny. So I went through several things. First Uncle Buddy was going to be a magician, and you were going to go around finding all the props to his various magic tricks. But I thought, "there are not a lot of jokes in that, and I've already got a lot of puzzles." Then Aunt Hildegarde was going to be a typical tabloid reader. She would be into the occult and into weird diets, and things like that. But it was too far-flung and I really couldn't get a lot of jokes out of it, so I thought, "what about the movie thing?" Since I used to write these things, I thought that maybe the movie angle would be good, so I came up with Uncle Buddy being a "B" movie producer.

CE: And since you're from L.A., that would seem like a natural, especially when it comes to the publicity for the game. And speaking of publicity, I understand from the press release that your office at Infocom is papered with beach posters.

Dave: I have a mural on one whole wall that's a beach scene.

CE: That's for real?

Dave: Oh yes.

CE: You're living the part.

Dave: Right there on the beach.

CE: So you are the token odd-ball Californian in the stately halls of Cambridge?

Dave: There are other Californians, but they've pretty much adopted the East Coast lifestyle. I still wear Hawaiian shirts, and when it snows I wear shorts, just to keep everyone on time. One day last winter, I didn't know it was snowing, and I came to work in long pants. And everyone said, "Dave, it's snowing. How come you're not wearing shorts?"

CE: Tell me about the hedge maze in HOLLYWOOD HIJINX. If I'm to believe what I read about it, you constructed the model out of paper clips.

Dave: Right. I drew a huge grid on a large sheet of graph paper, and then I took 700 jumbo paper clips and worked with that, moved them around. I read a few magazines trying to learn what makes a maze. I played with it about a week, and then when we transferred it down to the [8-bit] Atari, which is the smallest width screen, it turned out it was too big, so I had to redo it. I think I ended up redoing it twice.

CE: I noticed that what seemed to be a map that I found early in the game seemed to be rather long and narrow on my 80-column Apple screen. Even with it I managed to get hopelessly lost the first time I went into the hedge-maze.

Dave: That's only half of the map. One half has vertical lines, and the other has horizontal. When you put one on top of the other you get a whole map of the maze.

CE: Well, I assumed there was something important in that maze, since there's an "X marks the spot" right in the center of the map -- unless of course it's a red herring, and a red herring would not be an unexpected thing in an Infocom game.

Dave: I wouldn't do that. Steve Meretzky ["Leather Goddesses of Phobos," "A Mind Forever Voyaging"] would do that. I would never put in a red herring. Everything's in there for a purpose -- well I shouldn't say everything. There's a bath mat I put in just for a joke.

CE: I understand that some responses to unusual actions taken by a player in an Infocom game come out of the Beta testing.

Dave: Right. In this game, one of the treasures is the lost film, "A Corpse Line." One of the testers suggested that when you show the film, you should die also, like Uncle Buddy. So you're able to put on the film reel and watch it. It says when you walk into the projection room that this is Uncle Buddy's screening room and he died here while watching a copy of "A Corpse Line." It has disappeared and no one has ever seen it since. So then when you show it, the same thing happens to you, and it gives a description of how bad the movie was.

CE: Well, you certainly never get to inherit the house that way!

Dave: There's a lot of gags like that in our games where you'll die or something unfortunate will happen to you just when you try something wacky.

CE: Well, that's what "saves" are for.

Dave: Right.

CE: I know you've had some "Marathons of the Mind" that have worked with HOLLYWOOD HIJINX. How many did you have?

Dave: The last one -- well, we tried to make it a little easier with a hint in the game because nobody was getting into the house in the beginning. There's also a puzzle with a leaky bucket that no one was figuring out, so we moved it and sort of start the puzzle for you. In the game, though, you can go around and do almost any puzzle independently of the other puzzles. It's not really linear. The time, I guess at Pittsburgh, which was after we had watered it down some, trying to make it a little more accessible because it was really too hard, I think we started at 7 p.m. A team finished, I think at 7:30 the next morning. So it was twelve-and-a-half hours, but we had taken a couple of breaks, so it was probably something closer to nine hours.

CE: This is with three kids working together, of course, and I think that it is easier when you have several people working together.

Dave: Oh sure, you get on a roll and you just keep going.

CE: It seems that a Marathon of the Minds can be almost another form of Beta testing because you do make some changes in the program.

Dave: On HOLLYWOOD HIJINX we were having marathons very early, but sometimes the program is already in duplication when we're having marathons, so no changes are made.

CE: How does the timing usually work on a new game, from beginning through beta testing to the point when it's on store shelves?

Dave: It usually takes anywhere from nine months to a year to do a game. For the first four or five months, you're just writing and putting it all together. Then it goes into alpha testing. Depending on the author, that can be anywhere from four weeks to ten weeks. In alpha testing, it's really up for grabs whether a puzzle should stay or not, or whether it's too hard or too easy.

CE: Is alpha testing done inside or outside Infocom?

Dave: Alpha testing is done inside. And the various testers see it one at a time, sort of stretched out, so that everyone sees it fresh and not everyone see sit at the same time or at the same stage. They can't see how it evolves or how the changes are affecting it. So that goes on for four to ten weeks. Then, once we feel it's ready, it goes to beta testing, which is where we mail it out to different testers we keep a list of -- people who have written in about bugs, or some people we've found at marathons. That usually lasts four to five weeks. And in the meantime, the author is still working on the game and fixing the bugs. Once it's in beta, it's more or less set. The storyline is there, and the puzzles, and so forth, unless they turn out to be too hard to too easy. When the beta reports come back, it's about a week, and we make all the corrections. Then it goes to gamma testing. Now in theory, gamma means the game is finished, but it never works that way. In gamma, we found out what people think of the changes that took place in beta.

CE: Are the people who see it in gamma the same ones who saw it in beta?

Dave: No. It's a fresh batch for gamma.

CE: Do you ever use the same testers for more than one game?

Dave: Oh yes. A lot of people will do up to three games in a year. We have some guys who are really very picky and specific about things, and we like to get their opinions.

CE: Do you ever get people who write to Infocom, asking to be a game tester?

Dave: Yes, we get lots and lots of letters from people who want to be testers. It's kind of tough, because a person who just sends in a letter, we don't know good they are. So the people who send in bugs are the ones we're more likely to ask to be a tester.

CE: What about the issue of security in letting out a program before release?

Dave: All of our disks have a number on them, a sort of secret number, and we can type in a code and verify it. If it shows up on a bulletin board, we can tell whose disk that was. A lot of pirates think they can hack this number, but it's not imbedded in the code. It's a mathematical thing that comes up with a number. You'd have to take out parts of the game, which you really can't do. Disassembling our stuff doesn't work because we do it on a mainframe.

CE: You've mentioned in passing the hardships of dealing with some of the computers because of the space limitations. Do you have an easier time working with the senior machines, the 16-bit machines?

Dave: We still have to write for that [8-bit] Atari, and that's the limiting factor right now. We've not made a decision to abandon the Atari 800.

CE: What do you see as the future of interactive fiction? Do you see some advances that might take it in new diretions or change it in any way that we can look forward to?

Dave: Sure. Hopefully it will get bigger, and we can write more. We can take more space and write them faster. A lot of what we do now is trying to squeeze things together. If I could just sit down and write without worrying about how many objects I've used. Right now we can only use 256 objects, but on a larger system there's no limit.

CE: So you're saying that it depends on the consumer and what kind of hardware most of them purchase -- how soon they move away from 8-bit machines is completely or nearly so.

Dave: Well, I'm sure that a lot of people have given up on their 8-bit Ataris, because most companies are not doing anything for them, or if they do it's always the last thing they convert. But there are other things coming. There's CDI, the interactive comapct discs.

CE: We understand that Infocom is working with CDI.

Dave: I keep getting different stories about what the stage of development is. But, yes, we are looking into that. There's a huge amount of space there, but there's no protocol yet. No one has decided what the operating system will be fore sure. But our stuff seems like a natural for that type of thing because you have random access that can go all over the place. And with all that space, you can have pictures -- not necessarily cartoons, but more like static illustrations to enhance a story.

At this point, we had to let Dave go back to his charges -- the 60 members of the 20 Los Angeles area high school teams who were deep in the red tape of "Bureaucracy." (Story next month.)

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