Our always improving development environment, parser, et cetera, was a big rea-
son for the high level of quality. The talented testing group, and the time we scheduled
for testing, bug-fixing, and general improvement, was another big factor.
Did Infocom’s consistent quality level allow it to weather the “crash” of the
mid-’80s pretty easily?
The mid-’80s crash began with a crash on the video games side, and then spilled over
into the PC market. Many companies had a mixture of video game and microcomputer
SKUs, but Infocom was entirely in the PC market. Also, our games were as
un-video-game-like as possible. Another reason why the mid-’80s slump had little
effect on Infocom’s game sales was that we were on so many machines, and we could
quickly get onto any new computers that were released. For example, the Mac came
out in early 1985, and our games were extremely successful on the early Macs. And, of
course, the high quality helped, because during any slump it’s always the schlocky
products that die first.
To me, it seems that Infocom games are the only titles from the early ’80s that
don’t seem at all dated. Why do you think that is?
Well, graphics from games in the early ’80s look awful, but text just looks like text. So
time is kinder to text adventures. And, as we’ve already covered, the games were of a
very high quality, which helps them hold up over time. And, once you’ve eliminated
technical obsolescence as an issue, ten to twenty years isn’t a very long time for a cre-
ative work to age well or not well. Think about books, movies, TV shows, et cetera from
the same period. Only a very few that were unusually topical would seem dated today,
and Infocom games certainly weren’t topical, with perhapsAMFVas a lone exception.
And it’s certainly not unusual for people to continue to enjoy the best works long after
their creation:I Love Lucyis forty years old,Gone With the Windis sixty years old, the
films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are eighty years old,Alice in Wonderlandis
one hundred fifty years old, and Shakespeare’s plays are four hundred years old.
Did the Infocom team think that text adventures would be around forever?
We certainly thought they’d evolve, in ways foreseeable and unforeseeable. While
everyone had their own ideas, I’d say that around 1985 a composite of the thinking at
that point would be something like this: graphics will improve to the point that they’re
worth putting in adventure games, there will be a growing emphasis on story over puz-
zles, games and game-worlds will get larger, there will be more realistic, believable
characters in adventure games, many people who have been successful storytellers in
other media, such as fiction writers and movie auteurs, will gravitate toward adventure
games as the storytelling medium of the future. Looking back, only the first of those
points came to pass.
But despite anticipated changes, I think everyone thought that adventure games
would be around indefinitely in some form. I don’t think anyone thought that by the end
of the century all forms of adventure games would be virtually defunct as a commercial
game type.
188 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky