October release. The game quickly shot to number one on the best-seller lists, and
stayed there for months.
I’ve seenHitchhiker’sreferred to as a particularly hard Infocom game. Was that
your intention?
Douglas and I both felt that adventure games were becoming a little too easy, that the
originalZorkhad been much harder than more recent offerings, and the 24/7 obsessive
brain-racking was what made these games so addictive. So we might have overreacted
and gone too far in the other direction. Certainly, Infocom’s testing staff was strongly
urging that the game be made easier.
On the other hand, the game’s most difficult puzzle, the babel fish puzzle, became a
revered classic, and Infocom even began selling T-shirts saying, “I Got the Babel Fish.”
So it’s possible that, while some people were turned off by the level of difficulty, others
were attracted by it. My feeling was, and continues to be, that people who find the game
too hard can get hints, while people who find the game too easy are screwed because
there’s no way for them to make it harder.
Another contributor to the difficulty may have been the abbreviated testing sched-
ule for the game, because an already aggressive schedule was made even more so by
Douglas’ spell of procrastination. More time in testing generally results in an easier
game, because the inclination is that if even a single tester found a puzzle too hard it
should be made easier.
A Mind Forever Voyagingis almost completely missing the humor you are so well
known for in your other titles, yet I think it is one of your best works. Was your
goal with that project to make a more serious game?
Yes, partly that was a reaction to having just completed a purely comedic game
(HHGTTG), and partly the feeling that interactive fiction was such a compelling
medium that really “took over” someone’s life for days at a time, it was an ideal way to
put out a political/social message. It was my attempt to change the world, as it were.
The goal was not just to make a work that was more serious and that had a message, but
also to create a work that moved away from puzzles and relied more on its story.
The pretense for the player’s existence inAMFVis very interesting and a
change from other Infocom games. Did you feel the need to “break the mold”
with this title?
I’m not sure what the inspiration was for the main character inAMFV being a
self-aware computer, although I can remember the moment when the idea came to me,
just sitting at my dining room table with one of my roommates, eating dinner. The navi-
gational and interface differences just seemed like a natural extension of that initial
decision. “Breaking the mold” in that way wasn’t in my mind as much as “breaking the
mold” in the game’s content, as I mentioned earlier.
176 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky