------- 10-Sep-85 11:29:04-EDT,2294;000000000001 Mail-From: SWG created at 10-Sep-85 11:25:39 Date: 10 Sep 1985 1125-EDT From: Stu Galley Subject: stuff for Binky To: imps at ZORK
After our talk with O'Leary at last week's lunch, I wrote the following, which I think expresses my view of what we do and how we do it.
I don't know whether this will make him any happier, but I'd like to give you a chance to comment before I show it to him.
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THE IMPLEMENTOR'S CREED
I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.
I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.
My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.
I want as many people as possible to share these experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds, and a broad range of "reading levels". I can categorize our past works and discover where the range needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the categories to reach every popular taste.
In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader. Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can make the final decisions about content and style. But I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from any source, in the hope that they will make the sharing better.
I know what an artist means by saying, "I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it." Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point.
I can't create quality work by myself. I rely on other implementors to help me both with technical wizardry and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my vision better and where the rough edges of the work need polishing. I rely on marketeers and salespeople to help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on others to handle administrative details so I can concentrate on the vision.
None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt my dedication to my art. -------
I know where this came from obviously since I posted it. But I'm wondering if anyone else does?
> I know where this came from obviously since I posted it. But I'm wondering if anyone > else does?
Infocom. The TO line is kind of a dead giveaway, although I knew it right from your post's subject, since I knew that Infocom called their devs "implementors".
Whoa, cool... I haven't looked at or thought about RAIF in a long time. I was pretty big into IF about a decade or so ago. I never did manage to get a game together for the big competition, although I entered a piece in the '04 IF Art Show and won a prize.
There is a folder called "VERYLOST" on the Activision release "Masterpieces of Infocom" that contains 3 folders and an ABOUT.TXT.
The txt's I posted were from those folders and the following is the ABOUT.TXT.
Have you ever sneaked into someone's room, read their diary, and then left without a trace?
That is sort of what this folder is. It contains a series of files downloaded from the old Infocom UNIX server, which made the journey from Cambridge to Los Angeles but didn't quite make it to our curennt spiffy world-wide headquarters.
The Infodope folder contains three issues of Infodope, INFOCOM's in-house newsletter. The Misc folder contains a great piece about writing Infocom fiction called The Implementor's Creed, notes on Infocom's favorite pastime, and notes from a Studio offsite meeting held by Infocom. The Aborted folder contains notes about several serious and not-so-serious ideas for games pitched around by the Infocom team.
Digging through this disc reminded of leafing through old newspapers in your grandmother's attic. You know the kind where they are advertising a 1932 Ford coupe in cherry condition for only $600? I felt like I had been born too many years too late to enjoy the best times of the game industry. Even though I played all of Infocom's text adventures on my Atari 800, I couldn't help but wish I actually created those games. I hope that everyone who plays these games will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed putting together this collection.
Jason Kay Activision Black Operations Team June 1996
============================================================================ From the Computer of G. Kevin Wilson SPAG Magazine, Editor and Infocommie June 19th, 1996.
I'm sure that many of you are old-time Infocommies. I myself got started on Infocom games (Wishbringer, to be exact) many years ago, when I got my first IBM PC XT.
I guess some of you are wondering why I enjoy text adventures, and why I'm still interested in them in this age of 3-D shooters, ray-traced adventures, and 16-bit sound. It's simple. You can't beat a good story. If those games would start with a great story and build everything else around that, they'd be brilliant. Most don't. With a text adventure, there was nothing else to support the game, you had to have a good story, or things fell apart. Now, Infocom wasn't always on the mark, but they hit it pretty consistently, and when they hit it dead center, the results were unforgettable. That's why you still hear grown adults babbling about 'Hucka-Bucka-Beanstalk' and 'that $%#&*$()! babel fish!'.
I doubt that many of you have heard of SPAG magazine. It's not available in a printed format, only over the Internet. It's a magazine about text adventures, but it's not just about the old text adventures. SPAG magazine has for the past two years been following the efforts of hobbyists and college students around the world to keep text adventures alive.
SPAG consists almost exclusively of reader-submitted reviews. The readers play text adventures, and then share their opinions of them with the rest of us. You are invited to submit reviews as well. By the way, if you have Internet access with FTP capability, you're in luck. There's a lot of material out there to help you write text adventures of your very own. There's even a newsgroup expressly for authors of text adventures to discuss tips and tricks. It is: rec.arts.int-fiction (The int-fiction stands for "interactive fiction", a phrase used by Infocom to describe the games they produced.)
The FTP site you'll want to visit is: ftp.gmd.de
Look in the /if-archive/ directory. You will find hundreds of text adventures, solutions, and text adventure design kits. If you look in the /if-archive/magazines/SPAG/ directory, you'll find all the issues of SPAG magazine freely available.
If you look in the /if-archive/info/ directory, you'll see several guides to help you with the less technical and more literary aspects of making a good game. I myself wrote "Whizzard's Guide to Authoring Text Adventures." Clunky title, I know, but I think I got my major points across in it.
Good luck playing these great games, and maybe someday we'll get together for a game of Hider-and-Seeker.
G. Kevin Wilson "Whizzard" whizzard@uclink.berkeley.edu
Meh, I'm being half tongue-in-cheek, but it does. I had ALL their titles, and solved most of them with my best friends Terry and Dave.
We loved them so much, we'd buy each new title the very first day they were available. We would brainstorm and consternate over how to get past various solutions... and I remember the heartbreak the time Floyd died, giving his life to save mine.
Quote: "Looks dangerous in there," says Floyd. "I don't think you should go inside." He peers in again. "We'll need card there to fix computer. Hmmm... I know! Floyd will get card. Robots are tough. Nothing can hurt robots. You open the door, then Floyd will rush in. Then you close door. When Floyd knocks, open door again. Okay? Go!" Floyd's voice trembles slightly as he waits for you to open the door. > OPEN THE DOOR "The door opens and Floyd, pausing only for the briefest moment, plunges into the Bio Lab. Immediately, he is set upon by hideous, mutated monsters! More are heading straight toward the open door! Floyd shrieks and yells to you to close the door." > CLOSE THE DOOR From within the lab you hear ferocious growlings, the sounds of a skirmish, and then a high-pitched metallic scream! > WAIT Time passes...
You hear, slightly muffled by the door, three fast knocks, followed by the distinctive sound of tearing metal. > OPEN THE DOOR Floyd stumbles out of the Bio Lab, clutching the mini-booth card. The mutations rush toward the open doorway! > CLOSE THE DOOR And not a moment too soon! You hear a pounding from the door as the monsters within vent their frustration at losing their prey.
Floyd staggers to the ground, dropping the mini card. He is badly torn apart, with loose wires and broken circuits everywhere. Oil flows from his lubrication system. He obviously has only moments to live.
You drop to your knees and cradle Floyd's head in your lap. Floyd looks up at his friend with half-open eyes. "Floyd did it ... got card. Floyd a good friend, huh?" Quietly, you sing Floyd's favorite song, the Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner: ....
As you finish the last verse, Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side. You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live."
Ugh. I actually cried, and was actually depressed for a day over it. Al three of us were in shock.
And when the wait for a new title got too unbearable, we even wrote our own text adventures on my Commadore 64. We developed our own text recognition program to do it and everything, breaking the sentence down into words by looking for spaces, then comparing the first four letters of every word to a database blah blah blah... it worked as good as Infocoms, limited only by the size and complexity of the data base you created. Our adventure was based in our neighborhood and school, you could get on the school bus and ride to it to school etc. I also remember having to find your locker combination to get into the locker... you could do almost anything nasty to the principal when you encountered him too.... he got the brunt of all our adolescent angst... not much else do I recall. Its a shame nothing we ever made is still around... would have been great memories, especially since Terry has already passed away (can you believe that, I'm already to that age where old friends are already gone). Working FOR Infocom was a dream of ours as kids, but then the text-based adventures added graphics as computers got "better", which pretty much ruined the genre in my opinion. We bought ONE title with pictures and graphics (I forget which title that was), but it wasn't the same, and my interest faded in the subject after that. Why none of the three of us went into computer related jobs is bizarre, considering how geeked we were about them as kids.
So, yeah, I enjoyed your post. Anything Infocom is kewl to me.
Why is nothing you made still around? I still have everything I ever typed on a C64 on my PC. Mostly games I typed/copied from gazette magazine and may or may not have modified to my liking, but also a few cheesy original things I did while trying to learn a bit of basic. My fav is still the song I programmed in basic on the C-128 (easy as pie to program 3-voice music in c-128 basic as long as you have basic knowledge of music)
In fact... check this post in a little while, and I'll attach the .d64 image and you can load it up in vice (C-128 though, not C-64)
UPDATE:
LOAD "A. BOOT" ,8 RUN
For those who are unfamiliar with a C-64/128 keyboard layout, shift+2(@)= "
How'd I get the .d64 image? Found a schematic online for chopping off the end of a cable for a 1541 disk drive and wiring it to a DB-25 connector (old printer parallel cable)then used a DOS program called star commander to make the images. I saved all of the floppies I had to .d64 format for safe keeping
You know those "hoarders"... people that save everything...
Not my Mom. If it's not nailed down it gets thrown away or sold for $1 in the next garage sale.
I literally have NOTHING from my childhood... when my folks retired and moved to Florida... nothing survived the purge. She put the dog down, tossed everything that didn't fit in the car, and they moved. I wish I was joking. Me and my brothers were all like "WTF, MOM!"
> > Why is nothing you made still around? > > You know those "hoarders"... people that save everything... > > Not my Mom. If it's not nailed down it gets thrown away or sold for $1 in the next > garage sale. > > I literally have NOTHING from my childhood... when my folks retired and moved to > Florida... nothing survived the purge. She put the dog down, tossed everything that > didn't fit in the car, and they moved. I wish I was joking. Me and my brothers were > all like "WTF, MOM!"
used "soundrecorder.exe" and What U hear to make a .wma while playing it through the emulator, then nero recode converted to mp3.
A recording just doesn't do it justice. You can't (without being part of this conversation) realize the complexities of writing this as a young teenager, in basic, on an 8-bit machine that had only 3 voices to work with (unless you were a serious programmer that knew machine language... then you could trick the system into using the system 'beep' function as a 4th voice, separate from the SID chip).
Programing music for this thing in basic makes correct timing between voices extremely difficult, as evident in my attempt at keeping the other 2 voices going while a trill was being played by the main voice. The best I could manage are pretty much half-speed trills.
Playing it in an emulator kind of puts all of this into prospective.
At any rate, enjoy! Oh, and don't bother if you hate classical.
> At any rate, enjoy! Oh, and don't bother if you hate classical.
That's a pretty good effort for BASIC! Back in the day, I wrote some Pascal on 68k Mac to play some electro, riding straight on top of Sound Manager, and using Macintalk II speech synthesis for "vocals". Trying to get the speech synth to stay in time with the music was always fun. Too bad I lost that stuff in disk failures (I wasn't great at keeping backups in those days).
not really lazy, just in a hurry. My wife had one foot out the door to a lunch I definitely did not want to miss (the best shabu shabu place in Yamato).
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