Infocom

That's how you got past them.

And, um, one, uh, one or two of the Infocom games have a, well, I got a collection at one point and it just had a big answer book in it.

Um,

that had questions that you could look.

but no i i like points i think they're charming i feel like there's something and i think they also provide a space for some occasional gags like in a comedy game you know uh you'll occasionally see sierra games award a bunch of points and then take them away uh after the hero is met with some sort of unfortunate twist i think that's fine you know we had fun with it in stair quest this idea that you have 500 points but each level only awards one point suggesting perhaps there could be 500 levels of this stair climbing uh yeah i think points are a good place too that you can occasionally do some some clever stuff so points that's why

you know all right so on this there's a couple other thoughts that i have i think that If we're to bring back points, I would also want to bring them back in the style of like text adventures or at least like how Infocom did it.

But I think other games did this too, where you get a rank.

uh based off of your score yeah it's like you die and then it says you know uh you scored x out of x points your rank is this novice yeah and that i've always enjoyed that's something i enjoy in like the civilization games where Sid is number one where like it's like yes and and the bottom is Dan Quayle

It was a lot of fun.

I think if people liked Zork and other standard level, introductory level Infocom games, I think they will enjoy this game.

I didn't finish it, but we will definitely return to it.

And I do want to check out some of Charles Moore's other games too.

And at MIT, Tim Anderson, Mark Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling made their own clone of Adventure, Zork.

To sell it as a trilogy of microcomputer titles, they and a bunch of other people founded Infocom, which released the first part of Zork in nineteen eighty.

The same year, Ken and Roberta Williams and their Online Systems released high-res adventure Mystery House, a game with graphics in addition to text and not about looking for treasure in a magic cave.

It wasn't great, but Mystery House would provide a model of adventure likes to the Japanese scene later.

The games came in several tiers.

At the top were the ones played off disks because they didn't have to be loaded into the system RAM entirely, so they could have more content at the cost of slower operation.

Infocom, most famous for these, also implemented an advanced parser understanding complex commands and a simulation engine that allowed automated object responses to the most common actions.

However, such elaborate titles were in the minority in the nineteen eighties.

Obviously England was very, we had a lot of kind of companies like Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 and so on.

Obviously we had some of the Infocom stuff being important as well.

And a lot of freeware and shareware ones, stuff like Humbug and Jack Around the Gym and that kind of stuff.

So I kind of very much started with the dawn of like adventure gaming and really just sort of didn't stop.

Mm-hmm.

And I think about that transition of Infocom text adventures, like Zork-

Mm

... and things like that.

Nice.

I had pretty much every Infocom game from back in the day, and it, uh, for people that are really old, you'll know that, like, those Infocom games are really cool 'cause they would come with all this extra stuff in the box.

So, like, um, like a, like for...

Uh, what was the one that was for the, at the circus? It came with, like, a circus ticket and, like, a program.

Specifically, he reads about Deadline.

the classic Infocom murder mystery text adventure, with the twist from earlier Infocom adventures that the game world is moving the entire time, that there's been this murder at this mansion, and there are all these suspects, and they are moving around, they are meeting each other, they are doing things on their own clock, and it's your job to insert yourself into that routine, catch the right people at the right time to get the information you need, solve the mystery.

He's really intrigued by this because, again, he's a writer.

This is moving into the writing thing again.

At the time, there really aren't adventure games in Japan, really.

Again, some American stuff has been imported.

I don't know if any Infocom stuff has made it yet.

There hasn't been official translations.