~4 minute readTECHNOLOGY
Zorked Again
Lost in computer fiction
Across America tonight, computer-game players will slip floppy discs into their machines, and their screens will fill with ... words. Not jerky bits-and-bytes stick figures. Just words, firing imaginations to flight -- to the Great Underground Empire, where Lord Dimwit Flathead once ruled; to a dead planet where a galactic plague has wiped out every living thing except a robot named Floyd; to an Egyptian temple deep below the burning desert. The front-office glass at Infocom in Cambridge, Mass., where these programs are written, bears a sticker reading "Imagination sold and serviced here."
With 18 games on the market and four on this week's authoritative Softsel Hot List -- including Zork I, now marking its 169th week in the Top 20 -- Infocom is an industry leader in the text-only branch of computer gaming called "interactive fiction." The player is the central character in each story, and to a large extent determines how the action unfolds. At the start of Zork I, for example, you are in a field near a house. What next? Choose your own path. You may want to explore a bit first ("Go east," "Climb the tree") or go straight into the house ("Open the window," "Enter the house"). After each move the game answers back with a detailed explanation of where you are and what you can "see." Over the next few days or weeks (play time per game can run to 100 hours) you'll explore a vast underground cavern, solving puzzles and accumulating booty along the way -- and trying to avoid electronic death.
There are others writing and distributing interactive fiction. Simon and Schuster recently issued a game based on "Star Trek"; Adventure, widely considered the seminal work in the field, has slipped into the public domain and can be played on The Source data base, an electronic information service available to home-computer owners. But Infocom is the class of the field. Its games are cleverly written, beautifully packaged and punctuated with a sharp sense of humor. In fact, it was frustration over the primitive, stodgy Adventure that got the company started. In 1977 a group of MIT computer jockeys got the idea of trying to go Adventure one better. Over the next few years, recalls Joel Berez, now 31 and Infocom's president, Zork was their "midnight project."
The result was an instant hit on the MIT campus -- and, via the Arpanet data base, across the country. It was clearer and funnier than Adventure -- when a frustrated player types in any of several well-known obscenities, for example, the game responds, "Such language in a high-class establishment like this!" And its breakthrough programming enabled players for the first time to enter complicated commands in plain English ("Climb down the cliff and jump into the river"). The group founded Infocom in 1979, thinking they'd issue the game commercially and score some fast money to bankroll business software.
Losing sleep: It was six years before the company finally introduced Cornerstone, software to help nonprogrammers organize business information quickly and easily. In the meantime, the games simply took over. Zork begat Zorks II and III, then mystery games, science-fiction games and Tales of Adventure, each selling for between $35 and $50. A stable of in-house writers grew; today there are six. A devoted cult following grew, too -- mostly male, a third of them teenagers, another third in their 30s. The seductive power of Infocom began to spread. People began to lose sleep. Conversations like this were overheard among computer owners: "I went to the garden and got the key. Then I went to the Carousel Room, and southwest to the Cobwebby Corridor. But I couldn't get past the lizard and unlock the door. What do I do now?" Says Berez, "We originally thought these games would just appeal to cultists, fantatics. That was true. But the cult following got a whole lot larger than we expected." Last year sales topped $10 million.
This fall the company introduced the first in its Interactive Fiction Plus series, A Mind Forever Voyaging. Plus games require 128K of memory, twice that necessary for regular Infocom games; that limits the potential audience somewhat, but gives the writers twice as broad a canvas on which to work. In AMFV, writer Steve Meretzky has used the expanded memory to breathtaking effect, creating a richly imagined anti-Utopian futureworld. "I wanted to do something that was more of a story and less of a puzzle," says Meretzky. "And I wanted to make a political statement, which hadn't been done in this medium before." To a very large degree, he succeeded. AMFV isn't "1984," but in some ways it's even scarier. Players wander the streets of a South Dakota town in the year 2041, not really sure what they'll find or why they are there. And then ... well, have fun. But don't mess with the Border Security Force. And be sure to get home before dark.
This article appeared in
Newsweek
23 Dec 1985
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