made everyone feel a lot better about the acquisition. Unfortunately, Jim was axed by
Activision’s board of directors about a year after that.
How did you come to work onZork Zero?
It was my idea to do a prequel to the game, and everyone loved the idea of calling such a
prequelZork Zero. It poked fun at the whole sequelitis syndrome that gripped and con-
tinues to grip the computer game industry. I had writtenSorcerer, the second game of
theEnchantertrilogy that can be unofficially considered to beZork V. It was in the same
universe asZork, and as part of writing the game I compiled the first compendium of
Zorkhistory, dates, places, characters, et cetera, by combing through theZorkgames
and the firstEnchantergame, and then attempting to tie them all together with a com-
prehensive geography and history. There was some initial resistance to this from the
original authors, but it quickly became apparent how necessary — and later, how popu-
lar — a step it was.
So, I was pretty versed in theZorkmilieu whenZork Zerobegan to be discussed. In
fact, I think it’s safe to say that I was more of an expert onZork-related details than the
original authors.Zork Zerohad been on my list of potential next projects for a couple of
years, and probably would have been my game the year that I did thePlanetfallsequel,
Stationfall, except that Brian Moriarty had just finished an adventure-RPG hybrid that
we had decided to place in theZorkuniverse calledBeyond Zork, and twoZorkgames in
such close proximity wouldn’t work.
As an aside, after finishingStationfall, the decision was betweenZork Zeroand an
idea that I had been tinkering with for years: an adventure game set on the Titanic dur-
ing its maiden voyage. But Infocom’s management finally decided — and I heard this
many times over the next few years as I pitched this project to many publishers during
my post-Infocom days — “people aren’t interested in the Titanic.” So when the
Cameron movie came out and became the most popular movie ever, it was something of
a bittersweet moment for me.
When the decision came down to go ahead withZork Zero, the first thing I did was
convene a brainstorming session with the original “implementors,” or three out of four,
at any rate. Marc Blank (who had long since left Infocom and moved to the west coast),
Dave Lebling (still a game author at Infocom), and Tim Anderson (still a “senior scien-
tist” special-projects programmer at Infocom) were all there. The fourth original
author, Bruce Daniels, had long since moved on. The only thing set in stone going into
this session was that the game would be a prequel, and that it would end “West of a
white house.” This session produced the very general framework for the game: the set-
ting of Dimwit’s castle, the reasons for the destruction of the Flathead dynasty, and the
collection of artifacts belonging to each of the twelve Flatheads.
Zork Zerois a strange hybrid of a game: it’s almost all text, with just some snip-
pets of graphics thrown in. What was the general idea behind the design?
At the time, Infocom was undergoing some stress and soul-searching. Our sales had
been dropping for several years. Going into the 1987 product cycle, the thinking from
Infocom/Activision management was “There arenthousand hard-core adventure game
fans who’ll buy any Infocom game no matter how many we put out. Therefore, the
180 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky