~7 minute readHow the Witness Came to Be
I got hooked on interactive fiction in early 1982, when I tested a preliminary version of Deadline. I had seen Zork and thought it was interesting, even fun, but the fantasy theme and the arbitrary nature of the puzzles did not excite me personally. But Deadline was different: it had a realistic setting, a realistic and coherent puzzle to solve, and a semblance of plot in its events and movements. So when, in the summer of 1982, I got the opportunity to work on a sequel, I took it!
The working title was "Invitation to Murder." Marc Blank had conceived the plot and made some sketches of the scene of the crime. The most significant part of the plot was Linder's death scene, which Marc had placed in a dining room with the detective and the other characters attending a dinner party, like the final scene in The Thin Man. Except for someone on the phone and someone else in the bathroom, everyone would be a witness to the death. Using the Deadline package as a model, Marc imagined that you would learn about the characters from newpaper stories instead of police interviews, and that the postmortem reports on Linder would be sealed inside an envelope with these instructions: "Do not open this package until instructed to do so."
With Dave Lebling's help, Marc had outlined the story in a few typewritten pages: who the main characters were, what their motives were, what evidence there would be, what you would see before the shooting, and so on. So I began my moonlighting work at Infocom by expanding on that outline: completing the personal histories, designing a realistic house, and running the story forward and backward through my head, with all the variations I could imagine, until I was convinced that there were no "holes" in the plot, that it made sense no matter how you looked at it or made your way through it.
Then the programming began. I made a copy of the Deadline program and ripped out everything that I didn't need: the house, the characters, the evidence, and the plot. Then I could build my own story on the foundation that was left. I decided to begin with the house, so that I could play the game as soon as possible, even before I put in the characters. As I had hoped, it was a thrill when the fledgling program let me walk around this house in my imagination! By the time the shooting first occurred, I was ready to quit my regular job and work at Infocom full time, at least.
In late January 1983, the program held together enough for me to demonstrate it to the folks at our advertising agency, as long as I didn't stray too far from the main line of the plot. At that demo, someone suggested that it would be fun to change the setting from contemporary to the golden age of American mysteries, the 1930's. Since Mike Berlyn had also suggested this, I got a copy of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and within a few pages I was convinced! Soon my office bookshelf had an old Sears catalog and a pictorial history of advertising (to help me furnish the house and clothe the characters), the Dictionary of American Slang (to add color to the text), and a 1937 desk encyclopedia (to weed out anachronisms).
Now, how to choose a particular date for the story, as in Deadline? I wanted a contrast between our present-day view of the thirties and the characters' view, so I decided to make the house a "modern" electric one. The Los Angeles area got cheap electricity from Boulder (now Hoover) Dam, completed in 1935, so the late thirties seemed like a good choice. I didn't want the complications of wartime living, and most people now think of World War II starting in 1939, so that was too late. And '38 has the same digits as '83, the year of writing, so I chose it. Next, I wanted a contrast with Deadline, so the season had to be winter, and I think of February as the epitome of winter, with no connotations of New Year's Day or the spring to come. The day should be Friday, so that a police detective could plausibly have time to check out the case after work, and the moon should be nearly full, so that darkness would not play a part in the mystery. That settled it: February 18. (I didn't realize, until the day arrived, that February 18, 1983, was also a Friday!)
In early February, Marc and I met with the agency's designers at a restaurant to figure out how to supply the evidence in the package. The designers argued strongly that everything in the package should be available to the detective before the story begins, with none of this sealed envelope business. We already knew that the package should contain the telegram that signifies your first information about the case, the newspaper stories that tell you about the main characters, and an instruction manual. There should also be something tangible that relates to Linder's fears and his relationship with Stiles: the suicide note from the police file on Mrs. Linder's death. We all wanted something even more tangible, something like the pills in Deadline that no one could forget. But what evidence could you gather before even entering the property? Finally the idea hit us: something that a character could have dropped just outside the property, something intriguing, informative, and true to life. How about a phone number cryptically scribbled on something? How about a restaurant matchbook? And so it was.
Soon the agency began seeking sources of authentic-looking props. Western Union was kind enough to supply the design for a 1937 telegram, and American Optical (another client of the agency) supplied copies of their ads from the period. Used magazines and pulp novels from a second-hand store supplied more ads and plenty of ideas for the package cover and magazine layout. The Register newspaper in Santa Ana was a great find: not only did they give us permission to reprint, but also they sent enlargements of several possible front and inside pages from their microfilm archives, so that we could pick the one we liked best. All the type had to be set again, to match our fictitious stories, but the photos were usable. Many of the original stories were funnier than any we had time to invent!
Meanwhile, back at the program, the "alpha" test had begun, when a company tester played the game over and over, looking for bugs and inconsistencies. He discovered significant "branches" in the story that I had overlooked. For example, what if the player sneaks into the house or doesn't go in at all until too late? The first possibility raised too many complications, so we decided to lock all the outside doors. For the second case, I had to invent a new sub-plot that could involve trying to accost Stiles and get new evidence, or trying to get past Phong after Stiles had come and gone.
The "beta" test began in mid-March, when we sent copies of the program and the prototype package to some friends and volunteers outside the company. Based on their reports, and on continuing testing at Infocom, we decided to add some features to round out the story: giving the characters responses to questions about yourself, letting you handcuff the corpse, putting the L.A. Times (found in the Harvard library) in Linder's office, using its radio schedule to make the radio programs authentic, and so on.
In late April, we sent out copies for final testing, which we call the "gamma" test. During this time, I got the feeling (which was typical, I was assured) that there was no end to the little bugs that kept appearing, and that maybe I should throw away the program and start over. But finally the bug reports trailed off as the deadline for production neared. In late May, I declared the program finished, prepared master disks for all the different computer versions that Infocom sold at the time, and sent them out for duplication. It wasn't until July that The Witness appeared in stores, and it was several months later that the first magazine review appeared.
What was the biggest thrill in the whole process? I don't know, because there are many thrills:
- designing the story, when the opportunities seem so rich;
- playing the game myself for the first time;
- watching someone else play it for the first time;
- making a complex feature of the story work, after many trials;
- seeing a package design that I feel good about;
- seeing a complete package, "hot off the press";
- seeing my creation on the shelf (or in the window!) of a store;
- reading a favorable review of the story; or
- getting a special piece of fan mail from someone who got hooked on interactive fiction because of me!
This article appeared in
New Zork Times, The
Jul-Sep 1984
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
