strategy should be to put out as many games as possible.” We put out eight games dur-
ing 1987, whereas in any previous year we’d never put out more than five. And all of
them did pretty badly. So, going into the 1988 product cycle, the thinking was “Text
adventures are a dying breed; we need to add graphics to our games.”
Throughout Infocom’s existence, we had always denigrated graphical adventures,
and during the early and mid-’80s, this was pretty correct. While the early micros were
pretty good at arcade-game-style graphics, they were pretty awful at drawing pictures,
as seen in the graphic adventures of that time period. But then the Macintosh came out,
providing much better black and white graphics than had been seen to date, followed by
the Amiga, which did much better color graphics than anyone had seen before. IBM-PC
graphics cards were also getting better. So graphics were starting to look reasonable
and give all-text a run for its money. Infocom was a bit slow to come around to this truth.
So, in late ’87 and early ’88, Infocom’s development system was being completely
overhauled to handle the addition of graphics. At the same time, the game authors were
collectively and individually wrestling with the issue of how to use graphics in games.
Some people decided just to use them to illustrate occasional scenes, the way a book
with occasional illustrations might use pictures. This is what Dave Lebling did with his
IF version ofShogun.
Since the goal forZork Zerowas to be a classic puzzle-based adventure game on
steroids, I decided that I primarily wanted to use graphics for puzzle-based situations,
so I created five graphical puzzles: a rebus, a tower of Hanoi, a peg-jumping game, a
pebble-counting game called nim, and a card game called double fanucci. But I didn’t
want the game to just look like an old-fashioned text adventure the rest of the time, so I
designed the three different decorative borders: one for outside, one for inside build-
ings, and one for inside dungeons. I also gave every room an icon, and then used those
icons for the on-screen graphical maps, which was a pretty good mnemonic device.
Finally, I used graphic illustrations in the Encyclopedia Frobozzica, a book in the library
that was basically an in-game version of theZorkuniverse compendium that I’d begun
compiling while working onSorcerer.
But none of the graphics games sold any better than the previous year’s all-text
games, and by mid-’89 Activision decided to shut Infocom down.
They didn’t improve sales at all?
I would say that during the previous year, ’87, all the games sold around twenty thou-
sand. And the four graphical games that came out in late ’88 and early ’89 also sold
around those same numbers.
So why do you think that was? LucasArts and Sierra seem to have been quite
successful with their graphical adventures around that time.
Yes, at the time Sierra was selling several hundred thousand copies of their games. But
certainly not Lucas nearly as much. Lucas was in fact quite frustrated that they were
putting out games that they felt were technically pretty identical to the Sierra games
and in terms of writing and content were really superior to them, and yet only selling a
fifth or a third as many copies. And I don’t really know what to think about that. It might
just be that Sierra was doing a really good job producing games that were very well
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 181