4. Mike Gerrard's Lebling Interview (1987) ========================================== "Interview at the end of the universe" by Mike Gerrard [Atari ST User (???), May 1987] ----- ----- ----- Interview at the end of the universe Mike Gerrard meets Infocom's Dave Lebling WHEN the 1986 awards were handed out recently by the Software Publisher's Association in America, the software industry's main trade association there, the name of Infocom was prominently featured. Silver Certificates were awarded to its recent adventures, Wishbringer and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, for selling more than 50,000 copies, a Gold Certificate went to an earlier game, Suspended, for passing the 100,000 mark. And there were Platinum Certificates (for over 250,000 sales each) for Infocom's two most famous titles, Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sales of Zork have obviously come on a little from when it was originally released, as I discovered when I spoke to the game's co-author, Dave Lebling, making his first visit to England. "Zork did start slowly", he told me. "We were originally distributed by Visicorp, which is the company that also distributed VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, and they sort of had the feeling I think that, well, this is a very nice game but games were not very exciting at the time, but we've got this spreadsheet which is really exciting. "So it started off with pretty much what games sold then in the United States when they were introduced, which was about ten or twelve thousand copies. That was pretty much what they expected, and they weren't terribly interested in pushing it harder. "So we got the distribution rights back from them and started distributing it ourselves. We repackaged it and it was very successful, and because it was our own product we were very motivated to make it a success and it began to pick up from that time". As well as helping to write Zork, Dave Lebling was one of the men behind the setting up of Infocom in the late 1970s. "The Dynamic Modelling Group was really where we all started from, which was a research group at MIT (Massachusette Institute of Technology) and we did many different things. We did electronic mail and database systems and all kinds of very serious funded research-type stuff. But we also spent a lot of time fooling around in our spare time, hacking. "At the time we were on the computer network ARPAnet, that was run for research sites that got money from the Department of Defence in the United States and one of the things that this network is used for is sending interesting software around from place to place. "One such piece was this game called Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure and everyone just went totally berserk over it. "The excitement was astonishing because nothing like it had ever been seen before and all work ceased throughout almost the entire country at these research sites. "It was almost like an infection. One site would get it and all work there would cease for a couple of weeks and then it would spread to sites nearby...you would look at the computers, because these were all time-sharing machines, and there would be 12 people logged in but they were all playing Adventure". This original game was written by two programmers called Crowther and Woods, and because it was public domain software it has since appeared in various versions, notably in the UK by Level 9/Rainbird as the first part of the Jewels of Darkness trilogy for the ST. Adventure was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, as was Dave Lebling himself. "I used to play D&D and I liked the idea of being able to play it on a computer. I've always been a science fiction and fantasy fan and that was a way of indulging that interest, so the combination of D&D, fantasy, computers, was so seductive that it was impossible that I wasn't going to end up playing it". The game and the idea of computerised adventures attracted several other people at MIT who set about trying to write their own game. This dealt with magic and mystery in the great underground empire of Zork. Dave Lebling was principally involved in the creation of a parser that would extend the simple verb-noun format of adventure to read and understand quite complex inputs from players. Zork was hacked into ARPAnet, and when the group of people from MIT decided they wanted to form a software company it was to be their first release. Says Dave: "We wanted to have a software company, and we weren't quite sure of what it would do, but we thought Zork was a good thing to start with because we had seen Scott Adams' adventures, which were the first ones to be seen on micros. "We said they were all very nice but we could do much better and it was just a question of how much of our mainframe adventure game we could fit on a micro. We found the answer was about one-third, so we did that and then the next third and the next making three games out of it". Zork proved to be the making of Infocom, and although the company's published a couple of other products - Cornerstone, which was a relational database, and Fooblitzky, a graphic strategy game - it is the text adventure game they are renowned for. The latest release, Hollywood Hijinx, is the 23rd in a row. It comes, as do all the others now, with the familiar detailed packaging that makes the opening of the box containing an Infocom game such a treat. Hollywood Hijinx is written by Dave "Hollywood" Anderson, who started with Infocom as an adventure tester, a route taken by several people now writing adventures for the company. "Four of our writers are former testers", Dave Lebling explains, "such as Steve Meretzky, who wrote Hitchhiker's with Douglas Adams, then Jeff O'Neill who did Ballyhoo, Dave Anderson, and a new writer named Amy Briggs. "What often happens is that people come into our testing department and they start hinting that they have a good idea for a game, and that's how they turn into writers. The way we typically write games is to write a short scenario of three or four pages of "This is what it's going to be about' and circulate it to other authors to see what they think, almost like a job application, and that's what Hollywood did - his nickname really is Hollywood, by the way. "We get together at least once a week, all the writers, and discuss what's going on. That's another incentive for a tester to become a writer, because testers are barred from our lunches! Every so often someone will say 'Don't tell me any of the details of any of the puzzles,' and you even get people saying, 'I'm going to get up and leave now, I don't want to hear it.' That's so you get the pleasure of playing the game for yourself when it's finished. "With Hijinx I knew in slightly more detail what was happening because Hollywood, being a new writer, was asking a lot of questions about how to implement particular things, how to make an elevator work, or how to program the Atomic Chihuahua. As a result we knew far more details of that game than we would of a Steve Meretzky game, for example. "All our authors do both the programming and the creation of scenarios, the writing of the adventures, but it works out pretty well because the level of programming ability that it takes is not all that high. "We use a very high-level language and you can learn the rudiments in a few hours. From then on it's just a question of when you get in a sticky spot you come to someone else, like myself or Steve Meretzky, and say 'Well, I've got this rope...how do I do a rope? It can be in two rooms at once if you tie it to something and take the end with you, and can you tie things up with it and drag them around with you?' "Then we'll stop and think and say, 'You don't want to have a rope in your game,' and that makes it much easier for the new writers, you see. "My new game has a chain in it, and it's even worse than a rope in almost every respect you can imagine and it's caused me no end of horror...the number of bugs that have come in on this chain alone would stack from here to there and back again". Having enjoyed Dave's previous games, which as well as Zork were Starcross, Suspect, Enchanter and Spellbreaker, I ask him what his new one will be about. "I'm afraid we have this stock response to questions about our new products, which is that it's not our policy to talk about them until about six weeks before they're released...but I can tell you a little bit about it. "It's got some very bizarre stuff in it and it's in a new genre. It's not a Tolkein-style fantasy and it's not science fiction and it's not a mystery and it's not a comedy". I thank Dave for this detailed information and ask about the fact that Infocom no longer seems to categorise its games or rate them as to how difficult they are meant to be. "No, we no longer do that as it seemed to be becoming a little meaningless. Like the new game, Bureaucracy. What is Bureaucracy? It's got some science fiction elements and some fantasy elements but it's mostly just bizarre, so we'd have had to create a special category to put it in". As it's less than six weeks to the release of Bureaucracy the ST will be the first machine to see it - I ask Dave if he can tell me a little about that. "It's the third that we've done on our fairly new 256k system, which will only run on the larger and newer machines. The story is set off by your ill-fated decision to move to accept a wonderful new job that involves having to accept a free trip to Paris. So you send a change of address form to your bank, which promptly does what banks always do with that sort of thing, which is to throw it away. "As a result your entire life begins to collapse into a shambles of total uselessness. You basically have to acquire the means to extricate yourself from this situation of having no money, of having your mail going to the wrong address, having your credit cards cancelled, your computer not working, all the kinds of terrific things that can happen. "One of the people who tested it - fortunately in the minority - didn't like it very much because he said, 'I have enough of this happening at work. I don't want to go home and have it happen too!" With Hitchhiker's such a success, and Bureaucracy set to follow it, I wondered if there would be any more Infocom/Douglas Adams' collaborations. "Well, I'm afraid it's not company policy etc etc...but the obvious next thing to do would be The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and there's always the possibility that that will happen". On leaving I ask Dave, just for the record, what his job title is at Infocom. "It's officially written in my job description that I wander the halls clutching a cup of coffee... and that's about the size of it!"