It’s interesting that books seem to be able to coexist alongside television and
film. Why do you think text adventures cannot seem to do the same thing?
There is still a fairly vigorous marketplace for text adventure games. There are still
people writing them and people playing them, it’s just not an economic market. The
people writing them are not writing them for pay, they’re just writing them for the joy of
it, and the people playing them are mostly not paying for the experience. And I think
one thing that’s similar between writing text adventures and writing books is that it
tends to be a one-person operation, assuming that you use an existing text adventure
writing system. One person without too much specialized training can go off and in a
few months write a text adventure game, just like someone with a typewriter, word pro-
cessor, or big stack of paper and a pen can go off and write novels.
Perhaps it’s just a matter of scale, as you mentioned before. The total number
of people interested in playing a computer game is just a lot less than the num-
ber of people interested in other, traditional, non-interactive media.
I think that’s probably true, though I don’t know the numbers offhand. But I imagine a
best-selling book is probably not much more than a million copies or something. I seem
to recall that at the time we did the game, an aggregate of theHitchhiker’sbooks had
sold seven million copies, so maybe a couple of million each? And certainly the number
of people who watch television is certainly dozens of times more than that.
The interface for theSpellcastingseries was interesting. It allowed the games to
function exactly like the Infocom text adventures, but then added the ability
for the player to use only the mouse to play by clicking on the list of verbs,
nouns, and so forth. What was the idea behind this new interface?
This interface came from
the folks at Legend, partic-
ularly Bob Bates, who had
begun working on this
interface for his post-
ArthurInfocom gameThe
Abyss, based on the still, at
the time, unreleased
movie. The game was can-
celed when Infocom was
shut down by Activision,
and when Legend decided
to start publishing their
own adventure games, they continued developing that interface.
The impetus for the interface was not a particular feeling that this was a good/use-
ful/friendly/clever interface for playing adventure games, but rather a feeling that text
adventures were dying, that people wanted pictures on the screen at all times, and that
people hated to type. I never liked the interface that much. The graphic part of the pic-
ture was pretty nice, allowing you to move around by just double-clicking on doors in
the picture, or pick things up by double-clicking on them. But I didn’t care for the
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 189
Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls