once said, “put meat on the bones.” Lots of the humor, the responses to wacky inputs,
the subtle degrees of difficulty, the elimination of unfair puzzles — these were all the
products of Infocom’s excellent testing group.
The packaging for Infocom games was really unique. Why did the company go
above and beyond what so many other game publishers did?
When Infocom started, the standard for computer game packaging was something simi-
lar to a Ziploc bag. It was just a clear plastic bag with a Ziploc top and a hole to hang on a
pegboard in stores; the bag would hold a floppy disk and an often cheaply photocopied
manual. In fact, the early Radio Shack versions ofZorkwere in just such a package.
The original publisher ofZork Iwas a company in California called Personal Soft-
ware. In fact, the product manager for theZorkline at Personal Software was Mitch
Kapor, who went on to found Lotus. Shortly after they starting publishingZork,Per-
sonal Software hit it big-time with a program called Visicalc, the first successful piece of
business software for computers. They changed their name from Personal Software to
Visicorp, and decided that they didn’t want to waste their time dealing with games, and
they gaveZorkback to Infocom.
Rather than find a new publisher, Infocom decided to be its own publisher, and hired
an agency to design the packages. The result was the “blister pack” packages forZork I
andZork II, the first time such packages had been used for computer games. This is the
type of package in which a clear piece of molded plastic is glued to a cardboard back,
with the contents visible through the clear plastic, in this case the contents being the
Zorkmanual with the disk out of sight behind it.
When it was time for the packaging design on Infocom’s third game,Deadline, Marc
Blank went to the agency with a series of out-of-print books from the 1930s, written by
Dennis Wheatley. With names likeMurder Off MiamiandWho Killed Robert Prentiss?,
the books were a portfolio of reports and clues, just like a police detective would be
given when investigating a case: interviews with witnesses, typed letters, handwritten
notes, railway tickets, newspaper clippings, a used matchstick, and lots more. The idea
was thatyouwere the detective, and after sifting through the evidence, you should
decide who the murderer was and how they did it, and then open a sealed section of the
book and see if you were right.
Marc was very influenced by those books in creatingDeadline— in fact the original
working title wasWho Killed Marshall Robner?— and he wanted the agency to be very
influenced by them in creating the packaging forDeadline. Marc wanted the player to
feel like they were a detective being placed on a case from the moment they opened the
package. Also, because of the strict limits on game size, having lab reports and suspect
interviews in the package freed up space in the game for more interactive content. The
Deadlinepackage that resulted is very reminiscent of those Dennis Wheatley books,
with a photo of the crime scene, interviews, fingerprints, lab analyses of things like the
teacup found near the body, and even a bag of pills labeled “Pills found near the body.”
Those were actually white-colored SweeTARTS.
TheDeadlinepackage was a huge hit, even though we charged $10 more for it, $50
MSRP instead of $40 MSRP. We decided that great packaging was fun, was a great
value-added, was a great way to “raise the bar” and make it harder for new competitors
to enter our market space, and most importantly, it was a way to discourage pirating of
186 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky