So how did the Erasmatron project come about?
I set out to do interactive storytelling. I said, “I’m going to go back, and I’m going to do
my King Arthur game now.” Because I had done a King Arthur game at Atari that I was
proud of, that had a lot of good ideas, but I felt it did not do justice to the legends, so I felt
that I owed something to those legends. I started all over to do a completely new
approach. That led me up to the storytelling engine. However, everything was hand-
coded and it was enormously difficult. We had gone the rounds to all the big companies
trying to interest them in it and nobody was interested.
Just about that time, I ran into a lady named Edith Bjornson, who was with the
Markle Foundation. She suggested that I take the technology in a different direction, as
an enabling technology to permit non-technical people to create their own story-
worlds. I very much liked the idea. So Markle funded me, and the fundamental strategy
of the project was expressed in the slogan “Unleash a tidal wave of creativity.” Thus, I
was building three pieces of software. The Erasmatron, which is the editing software
for the engine, the engine, which actually ran everything, and finally the front end,
which delivered it to the user. It was a huge project and I had to do it in two years.
Unfortunately the problem turned out to be much bigger than I anticipated. What I got
working after two years was nice, and indeed technically adequate, but I don’t think it
was commercially adequate.
How do you mean?
It takes too much effort to create a sufficiently entertaining end result. Laura Mixon
worked onShattertown Skyfor nearly eighteen months. ButShattertownjust didn’t
work. It was not entertaining, it was not even finished. There were places where it
would just stop. Yet she worked longer and harder on it than she was expected to. There
wasn’t any failure on her part. The failure on my part was underestimating the magni-
tude of the task. I thought that a year would be sufficient. Well, first, she didn’t get fully
operational software for at least six months. And second, the tool she had was so weak
that she spent a lot of time doing busywork. The conclusion was that the Erasmatron
needed to be souped-up, and there were a few embellishments to the engine that came
out of that. But they were actually comparatively minor. Most of the work I have been
doing since that, on the Erasmatron 2, has been to make the whole process of creating a
story-world easier.
So you haven’t concluded that making a story-world is just an inherently hard
task? You’ve found ways to make it easier?
Well, there’s no question in my mind that creating a story-world with Erasmatron 2 is
immensely easier than with Erasmatron 1. Erasmatron 2 dramatically cleans up the
process of creating a story-world, cutting the time required roughly in half. You see,
with Erasmatron 1, we were shooting in the dark. I had no idea of what the process of
creation would look like. I don’t feel bad that Erasmatron 1 was a bad design; in fact it
was much better than the original design document. I’d made quite a few improve-
ments, but they weren’t enough. I think that, using Erasmatron 2, people can create
excellent story-worlds with an adequate commitment of time, which I consider to be at
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