aimed at a middle-brow audience, at kind of the broadest audience. And much like many
of the Infocom games, Lucas games tended to appeal to a somewhat more sophisticated
and therefore smaller audience.
So that’s why you think the Infocom graphical games didn’t take off?
Well, no. I think it was much more that by that point the graphical games had become
pretty sophisticated in terms of being not just graphical adventures but animated graph-
ical adventures, like the Sierra and Lucas games of that period. And the Infocom games
weren’t really more than illustrated text adventures. Even though the graphics were
introduced, I don’t think it was perceived as being that much of a new animal from what
Infocom had been producing up until that point.
So do you think Infocom might have been more successful using graphics if
they had made them more integral to the design of the games?
It’s hard to say what might have happened in ’87 if Infocom had said, “We’re going to go
out and exactly imitate the Sierra adventure game engine the way Lucas did.” On the
one hand, it has always seemed to me that whoever gets to a market first kind of owns
it. And I think that’s another reason that Sierra really dominated Lucas at that point.
There were certainly a lot of companies that came in, did text adventures, put a lot of
effort into it, and did some pretty good text adventures. For example, Synapse Soft-
ware, in the mid-’80s, with their BTZ engine did a few pretty good games. But they got
virtually no sales. It’s just pretty hard to go head to head with a market leader, even with
games that are just as good, because it’s hard to make up for that head start. On the
other hand, Infocom certainly had a name that was pretty synonymous with adventure
games, so if there was anyone who could have made headway against Sierra’s head
start it probably would have been Infocom. But at this point it’s completely academic,
obviously.
The Infocom games all ran off of pretty much the same storytelling system,
using nearly identical game mechanics from game to game. Do you think this
shared technology and design worked well?
It worked extremely well for its time. It allowed us to get our entire line of games up
and running on a new computer within weeks of its release. This was a tremendous
commercial edge during a time when the market was fragmented between many differ-
ent platforms and new, incompatible platforms were coming out all the time. For
example, there was a time when there were about twenty-five games available for the
original Macintosh, and fifteen of them were Infocom games. This annoyed the Mac
people at Apple to no end, since we didn’t use the Mac GUI.
Also, the type of games we were doing lent themselves well to a “line look,” both in
the packaging and in the games themselves. It gave them a literary feel: Infocom games
all look similar in the same way that all books look similar.
But even today, engines are usually used for several games, particularly if you
include expansion packs. And even though the final products appeared to be pretty sim-
ilar, the Infocom library actually represents several generations of the ZIL engine.
There was a pretty major revamping when the “Interactive Fiction Plus” line came
182 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky