A hoopy frood enters the room.

Spawned from his late-70’s cult-favourite BBC radio show, by 1983 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book series is a very successful SF comedy trilogy for British author Douglas Adams. As a technophile obsessed with computers, Adams discovers the original Crowther and Woods’ Adventure on then-popular dial-in online service The Source while he is residing in L.A., obsessively playing the game to completion while also trying to get a Hitchhiker’s movie off the ground. Adams then heads to the nearest computer store looking for more adventures.

He runs his way through Infocom’s text-adventure library with works like Zork and Deadline and The Witness, but it is only Michael Berlyn’s diabolical Infocom text adventure Suspended that Adams finishes to completion, although with all of them he is immersed in the exceptionally well-written and wildly popular interactive fiction coming out of the company in the 80′s. Adams himself has been approached many times with the idea of turning his most famous work into a video game, but has rebuffed them all. He feels he’s found kindred spirits at the Cambridge, MA game makers, however. That year he is introduced to Marc Blank by humorist Christopher Cerf, a mutual friend and person who seems to know everybody and isn’t afraid to facilitate introductions to see what results. Late in the year, Adams visits the Infocom offices while in town lecturing at MIT. Jumping at the chance of increasing their literary cred with another name author, Infocom signs Adams to a six-game contract in early 1984, with two of the games to be based on the published Hitchhiker’s books. And the company has a natural to pair up with the British humourist: the aforementioned Steve Meretzky.

Meretzky, after graduating from MIT with a degree in Construction Project Management, ran through several jobs in the field, and then was just kind of hanging around by the middle of 1981. Luckily for him, one of the people he hung around with was his roommate Michael Dornbrook, who at the time was testing Zork I and Zork II as Infocom’s first paid employee. Sitting down at the games himself, Meretzky started making his own bug reports, doing such a good job that Marc Blank eventually brings him on to test his mystery game Deadline. By the middle of the following year, Meretzky is a part-time tester at Infocom, and begins formulating his own game on the side, an SF comedy project with the initial working titles Sole Survivor, and then just Survivor. Testing less and writing more, in October Meretzky is bumped up to full-time game writer. His SF game, finally titled as Planetfall, becomes another success for Infocom when released in September of 1983, going on to win multiple awards.

Click the button to play Steve Meretzky’s classic Infocom text adventure Planetfall, on the Apple IIe

He later follows this up with a sequel, Stationfall. While he creates other games for Infocom, it is the hilarious and touching Planetfall that makes him such a perfect match for Adams, as the game is noted for having an altogether Adams-y sense of humour. Meretzky had not heard of Hitchhiker’s before writing Planetfall, but people testing the game remark how much it reminds them of Adams’ works. When presented with the possibility of collaborating with Adams on a Hitchhiker’s game, Meretzky has said he initially demurred: “When they asked me if I wanted to work with him, I took a long time saying yes; maybe two or three seconds.”  As for Adams, he dials in to various Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in England, trying to gauge user awareness of Infocom. He is met with a small, but rabid, fanbase of gamers.

The Hitchhiker’s computer game’s development process begins in February of 1984, when Meretzky and Adams meet in Boston to hash out their plans, and they continue separated over the next eight months or so. Adams writes passages in England and sends them through electronic mail to Infocom in Cambridge, MA where Meretzky adds additional material and then programs everything into the game using Infocom’s game development system. He then sends completed portions of the game to Adams for review. Connected by two DEC Rainbow computers and modems, the two writers exchange emails daily, and phone calls weekly. With it not exactly a stretch for Meretzky to adapt to Adams’ writing style, after it is all over both men have a hard time exactly specifying who wrote which part. In June of 1984, with the testing schedule looming in a few weeks and a release window established to take advantage of the Christmas season, Infocom sends Meretzky to England to prod the famous procrastinator Adams to finish his work on the game. At the time, the author is ensconced at his favourite hideaway; the Huntsham Court County House hotel in the village of Huntsham, located near Tiverton, Devon in the West Country. It is the hope of his book publisher that Adams will focus on the fourth Hitchhiker’s book, titled So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish. Hence Adams and Meretzky hammer out the remaining material for the game in four days. Returning to the U.S., Meretzky must miss the bucolic scenery and relaxed atmosphere of the English countryside as he delves into an intense three-week crunch session to finish the programming of the game. After a brief testing phase, Adams does some rewrites of the material according to feedback from game testing results.

Released in October 1984, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure becomes an immediate success, selling over a quarter of a million copies. Described by Adams as “inspired” by his book rather than an adaptation of it, the game rides the top of the game charts for months, and is Infocom’s second-best seller, topped only by the company’s Zork. By the end of 1984, it has sold 350,000 copies.

Click button to play Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the Commodore 64. Don’t believe the lies!

While faithful to the tone of the books, the game revels in breaking as many of the cardinal rules then established in interactive fiction, including outright lying to the player about available directions to travel in, and even what the player is able to see. In fact, Hitchhiker’s is cruelly obtuse, often requiring players to initiate actions outside of any offered information in the game, and at many times only those with knowledge of events in the books would know what to do. It also appears to be a favourite torture of Adams to let you miss some critical piece of equipment during a scene that would cause the game to dead-end later, with no recourse but to reload a save or replay the game. It also offers long, drawn-out sequences, such as the maddening Babel Fish Puzzle, which gains such notoriety that Infocom itself sells an official I Got the Babel Fish t-shirt. The ultimate goals of the game are unclear, except perhaps to retain your sanity as you play it. Hitchhiker’s is so hard, in fact, that even reviewers in computer game magazines are stumped; Jack Powell and Michael Ciraolo, reviewing the game for Antic magazine in its May 1985 issue, openly admit that they were stuck at a puzzle that delayed publication of their review for a month, and they STILL hadn’t completed the game. At times it seems that Hitchhiker’s was purposefully created as a ploy by Infocom to sell more of their Invisiclue hint books.

Puzzle brutalities aside, the game is an interesting extension of the Hitchhiker’s cannon, extending the book metaphor by featuring the literary device of footnotes that offer asides to the action. The actual Hitchhiker’s Guide is an inventory item in the game and features plenty of articles for the player to consult about. The game also takes a philosophical bent, with “no tea” being an inventory item that the player at one point drops after getting some real tea, and is eventually able to carry both tea and no tea at the same time after some synaptic calisthenics. Random events also serve to keep subsequent playthroughs interesting, and the game is also strangely obsessed with fluff of all kinds. So much so, that the feelies that accompany the game packaging include a bag of pocket fluff, as well as perpetually-darkened Peril Sensitive Sunglasses and a microscopic battle fleet (empty ziplock bag). Unfortunately, the accountants at Infocom are not froods who know where their towel is, as the one planned to be included in the box is costed out of the design. Considering all the ephemera that IS included with the game, though, Hitchhiker’s game is no fluff-piece, but a fitting entry to Guide lore. Soul-crushingly frustrating, but fitting none-the-less.

NEXT WINDOW PLEASE

With the resounding success of the Hitchhiker’s game, it’s no wonder that Infocom is anxious for a sequel. Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, based on the second Hitchhiker’s book by Adams, is tee’d up for development, with Adams planning to collaborate with friend and English author Michael Bywater on the project. The problem is that Adams is tired of producing sequels of his Hitchhiker’s material, and suggests instead Bureaucracy, an original game idea based on his real-life frustrations at trying to get his bank and utility companies to acknowledge a change-of-address after moving apartments in London. Infocom, having signed Adams on the idea that he would be bringing his popular Hitchhiker’s material with him, balks at the idea, but eventually, comes to terms with producing an original work with Adams.

Outside of forming the initial idea, however, Adams begins to let the project be bumped by other commitments, and so he eventually hands it over to Bywater to finish. In line with Adams’ initial concept for Bureaucracy, the game has the protagonist jumping through hoops to accomplish the most simple tasks, such as withdrawing money from a bank, purchasing an airline ticket or even just ordering food at a restaurant. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get the bank to recognize a change-of-address card.

The game starts, in true bureaucratic form, by having the player fill out a “software license application” form for the game, providing humorous comments as you fill in lines such as your last name, name of boy/girlfriend, and whether the player is male or female. The game will then reference you using the opposite of the information provided, such as calling you Mr. if you put your sex down as female. Throughout the game, the blood pressure of the player is shown on the top right of the screen, rising as annoyances occur or when the player enters an invalid command. It is possible to die of an aneurysm if the player lets this rise too high without taking a cooling off period. Following a lead from Hitchhiker’s, the game throws many random events at the player.

Click button to play Douglas Adams’ nightmarish Bureaucracy, on MS-DOS

Unfortunately, the prose in Bureaucracy is a bit twee, and the humour often comes off as forced. It moves from ridiculous to just plain stupid for convenience sake, offering up the idea of having to give a long, drawn-out food order in a restaurant to the waitstaff multiple times as the height of hilarity. It is less the Kafkaesque, paranoid nightmare it wants to be than an annoying, tortuous exercise in tedium. That might be the ultimate point of Bureaucracy, but does that make it an enjoyable game to play?

Bureaucracy is Adams’ last game for Infocom, although he does continue in the medium, assisting on projects such as LucasArt’s movie tie-in Labyrinth: The Computer Game.  Adams eventually forms a digital media company along with Richard Creasey and Robbie Stamp in 1996 called The Digital Village, and from this partnership comes the extravagant CD-ROM adventure game Starship Titanic, again joined by his friend Michael Bywater, among others.  In 2001, at the age of 49, Adams is rudely taken from us after suffering a heart attack.

This passage leads to a dead end.

Click to play the game that helped sign the death warrant for Infocom text adventures: King’s Quest

In 1984, the same year as the release of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, Sierra On-Line drives what is perhaps the first nail into Infocom’s coffin… their release of the spectacular graphic adventure King’s Quest. It ushers in faster processors, more advanced graphical capabilities, and more RAM, leading to improved graphics and sound supplanting text as the canvas of adventure game creation. Meanwhile, a lot of resources at Infocom are poured into a new Business Products division, with a new programming staff and marketing team to support Infocom’s deviation from their comfort zone of sophisticated adventure games and into business software… and what is perhaps the second coffin nail. Two years in the making, the new division produces powerful and streamlined database software Cornerstone, announced by Infocom on Nov. 1, 1984, and released the following year. Optimistic with promises from five of the top software distributors around the country to carry their product even before it is released, Infocom prices its database program at $495, but sales eventually stagnate and not even an eventual slashing of price down to $99 by 1986 can persuade the business community to buy volume software from a “games company”. While the program is as user-intuitive as you’d expect a product from Infocom to be, it is also cumbersome and ponderously slow. Cornerstone fails to catch fire, selling only about 10,000 copies, and the company finds itself in financial hot water. Announced on February 19, 1986, Infocom is purchased by Atari 2600 pioneers Activision for 7.5 million, paid mostly in company stock options and debt acquisition. Although Infocom management changes, with Joel Berez taking over the CEO role from departing founder Al Vezza, the announcement does pledge that the two businesses will remain separate and that Infocom will retain its facilities in Cambridge.

Over 1987 Infocom grosses $10 million, with over two million units sold of the original trilogy of Zork games alone. After purchasing the company, Activision wastes no time in bundling boxes of the classic games together in collections Zork Trilogy, Enchanter Trilogy, Science Fiction Classics and the Classic Mystery Library. That year the company also releases Beyond Zork, created in a little over a year by Brian Moriarty. This is Infocom’s first step in the evolution of their text adventure paradigm. Tasking players to embark on a quest for the magical Coconut of Quendor, Beyond Zork is the company’s first game with a graphical user interface, along with an onscreen map that changes as the players move from room to room. It also explores the realm of the role-playing game by assigning percentage statistics to seven attributes: Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Compassion, Luck and Armor Class. Raising these skills to a certain level is required to solve certain puzzles. The player also has a choice of choosing between a male and female character, who is referred to personally throughout the game.

Click button to play Infocom’s evolution into graphics, with Beyond Zork, for MS-DOS

Besides the onscreen, updating map, the “enhanced mode” features of the game include mouse support for computers that have one, for clicking on the map to move to adjacent areas. Users can also pin information to a window on the screen, allowing them to constantly keep track of such info as their inventory or the current room description. While the on-screen mapping and extra visual flourishes with the text are designed to make the text adventure easier to play, Infocom purists can revert to the no-nonsense display style of previous games if they prefer. There is also the ability to assign command strings to the function keys of your computer, and even the option to rename characters and objects. To make things even less frustrating while wandering around the Kingdom of Quendor, an undo function is available, even if the last command has resulted in your untimely demise. Be warned, however: if, when you perish, you happen to type out any popular swear words, you’ll take a -1 to your Intelligence rating. The geography and items (and their uses) are randomized from game to game, in order to keep players on their toes and increase the replayability of the adventure.

While still a purely text game, also new is Infocom’s venture into the romance genre, with Plundered Hearts, released in 1987. The implementor on the project is Amy Briggs, who works her way up from play tester to game designer, although Hearts is her only full game at Infocom. It is also the company’s first game that features a specifically female lead. Beyond Zork is followed up the next year by Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, designed by Steve Meretzky. Created over the course of 18 months, the game continues the march to integrated graphics with an onscreen map, visual puzzles to play and graphical flourishes around and inside the text prose.

Click button to play Infocom’s continued transition into graphcs, with Zork Zero

Despite Infocom’s continued attempt to catch up to a rapidly changing entertainment software landscape and integrate more graphics into their games, the company continues to accrue losses to the tune of an average of $200,000 per fiscal quarter between 1987-1989. In May of 1989, Mediagenic, formerly Activision, announces that Infocom will be leaving their long-time digs in Cambridge the next month and moving to the mother company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Ca. Only five of the remaining 26 employees at Infocom elect to move with the company. Joel Berez, for his part, had already left his position as Infocom company president in the summer of 1988, replaced by Joe Ybarra.

Click button to play the full-blown graphical point and click adventure game Return to Zork

In 1993 Activision gives the GUE the full graphical treatment in Return to Zork, produced by Eddie Dombrower, a man who would seem more at home on the ball diamond than in the Great Underground Empire, having programmed games such as World Series Major League Baseball for the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System (ECS), and perennial PC favourite Earl Weaver Baseball. In its play book, Return to Zork delivers a blistering fastball with over 20 hours of digitized footage of professional actors shot for the production, all spouting real dialog: a demonstration of the multimedia bells and whistles now available to game makers through the emerging CD-ROM market.

In 1995 Activision revisits the roots of Infocom by releasing the original games on the format, in a series of collections loosely grouped by genres, such as Adventure and Mystery. 1996 sees the release of Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands, with the 360 degrees “Z-Vision” graphics engine and an improved user interface. The game does, however, eschew the humour that made the original Zorks great for a more darker tone. Activision also takes a 180 degree look backwards the same year, with yet another mining of past glories. This box contains 33 of them, in fact, in a gathering of Infocom games titled Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces. After Nemesis, Activision gets back on track with Zork: Grand Inquisitor in 1997, similar in mechanics as the previous instalment, and  a star-studded affair that features no less than Battlestar Galactica/The A-Team star Dirk Benedict, among others (Rip Taylor!). With Inquisitor, the Zorky humour is back in full force. 

The passage ends here.

Befitting its literary aspirations, the Zork universe is also fleshed out in tree-killer book form, starting with a series of “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” type books, the likes of which influenced Interactive Fiction to start with. Here referred to as “A What-Do-I-Do-Now Book”, they are authored by S. Eric Meretzky, a more fancily titled and aforementioned Steve Meretzky. They are named Zork: The Forces of Krill (1983), Zork: The Malifestro Quest (1983), Zork: The Cavern of Doom (1983), and Zork: Conquest at Quendor (1984). As expected, readers are presented with perilous situations and given a choice of action which results in being directed to a page in the book where the outcome is described. These are followed by full novel tie-ins published by Avon Books between 1988 and 1991. First, comes 1988’s Wishbringer, a novelization of the original Infocom game from 1985, by Craig Shaw Gardner. The novelization of Enchanter, Infocom’s 1983 release, comes from Robin W. Bailey in 1989. Standalone stories The Zork Chronicles (George Alec Effinger, 1990) and The Lost City of Zork (Robin W. Bailey, 1991) continue to flesh out the ever-expanding world of the Great Underground Empire. Infocom continues the choose-your-own-path motif with their Infocomics series of computerized comic books, allowing users to read through a graphical story and jump to new perspectives in the tale. Work on these computer comics is outsourced to Tom Snyder Productions. Stories include the ZorkQuest Infocomics, set in the Great Underground Empire. With limited interaction and low-res graphics, the books are closed on Infocomics after only four entries.

There’s been a lot of fallout from Infocom and the dozens of games produced by the company, but the most enjoyable might be the graphic point-and-click adventure games made by Legend Entertainment, founded by former IMP Bob Bates, who was one of the few outside freelance programmers utilized by Infocom: in Bates’ case near the end of the reign of Infocom. Bringing in Steve Meretzky, Legend produces at least one unmitigated classic – Spellcasting 101:Sorcerers Get All the Girls, released in 1990.