• Witness Announced
• Zork Users Group Will Shut Down
• System News
• Deadline InvisiClues
• At Last, a Zork II Poster
• Zorkers Respond
• Meet the Zork Users Group
• More Kudos for Infocom Games
• Zork Users Group Now Spans 40 Countries
• A Note on Our Service

Infocom's long-awaited second mystery game is finally announced, and it was worth waiting for. The advance word is that it tops the highly acclaimed and tremendously popular Deadline.

"Witness is really wonderful."
Marc Blank, author of Deadline and Zork

Electronic Games magazine (primarily a video game magazine) awarded it the "Best Computer Adventure -- 1983." Deadline was voted the #2 adventure in Softalk magazine's poll of its readers. After a year on the market, it is still at the top of the sales charts -- very rare in this fast-moving market.

But Witness is up to the challenge. Once again, you are the detective who must solve the crime, but this time you are in a classic 1930's setting and the murder takes place before your very eyes.

"There is a great deal of mood setting -- the atmosphere is great!" says Marc Blank. "Although there are fewer characters in Witness, they are much better developed and more interesting. There is significantly more conversation, and the game is richer in detail."

The author of Witness is Stu Galley. One of Infocom's founders, he worked in the same group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science as Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Joel Berez (Infocom's president), and Mike (the founder of the Zork Users Group). Stu's background is physics (B.S. Caltech, M.S. MIT), which may seem odd training for writing mysteries, but Stu is an excellent writer, and is very well-read. In short, he is a true renaissance man.

"Stu is really great at the subtle things."
Steve Meretzky, author of Planetfall

The Zork Users Group will be shutting down for two reasons. Primarily, Infocom would like to be fully responsible for support of their products. Secondarily, Mike would be in a position of possible conflict of interest if he continued to run the Zork Users Group as an employee of Infocom.

The Zork Users Group will continue to process orders received through July 31. All orders will be handled as they have always been -- promptly and efficiently. There will be no difficulties with inventories (with the possible exception of the Zork I poster).

As of August 1, all orders will be handled by Infocom. Any orders received by the Zork Users Group after July 31 will be forwarded to Infocom. However, if you have a problem with a Zork Users Group shipment, write to our usual address.

Infocom will not be carrying all of the Zork Users Group product line. They will not carry buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, or the Zork I poster. They will carry our maps at least as long as the inventory lasts. A final decision on whether Infocom will continue to carry maps has not yet been made. InvisiClues will certainly be continued.

Orders placed in early August may be subject to delay due to the transition. We urge you to place all orders as early as possible.

The TI Professional is the latest system to be added to Infocom's list. All of the games are available for this new computer.

After our spring issue of The New Zork Times went out, Infocom withdrew its announcement of the PDP-11 and NEC PC-8000 versions of Suspended. This decision has been reversed again, and we expect Suspended to be available on these systems by the time you read this.

Deadline and InvisiClues were born in the same month -- April 1982. Both have been extremely popular, and have received critical acclaim. PC Magazine called InvisiClues "almost as much fun as Zork." InvisiClues for Starcross and Zork III, both introduced in October of 1982, became available in late December. Why has it taken a year for Deadline InvisiClues to be written? Certainly not for lack of interest. The Zork Users Group has received over 1000 requests -- more by far than for any other product.

Writing InvisiClues for Deadline was a difficult task. The game's problems are not at all like those of the Zorks or Starcross. Most of Deadline's problems are interrelated and in a sequence. Questions about problems further down the sequence would reveal too much and spoil the game.

The solution to this problem was a more creative use of the InvisiClues process. For delicate matters, neutral questions and situations are posed which direct the player to develop more specific, numbered, invisible questions. As usual, there is a section "for your amusement," which details many of the interesting or humorous things you may have missed. There is also a special section which discusses all 21 possible game endings and how to reach them.

We are sure you will find the Deadline InvisiClues meet or surpass the quality of those for the other Infocom games.

This is a poster any Zork lover would be proud to own. (Since the poster reveals solutions to certain problems, anyone who hasn't completed Zork II may want to wait.) You'll have to see it to believe it.

On the Zork Users Group

"This is a letter of appreciation. ... Your customer service is excellent and all of the products you offer make the games so much more enjoyable. I have every one of the Infocom games and all of the InvisiClues booklets. The InvisiClues are top-notch and well worth the price. ... 3 cheers for the Zork Users Group!"

Marian
Napa, California

"I was very impressed with the speed of delivery of my last order."

Walter
Dover, New Hampshire

"I am writing this letter because of your quick delivery and great games. I was pleased at the speedy delivery of your mail-order services. Your service is the best that I have encountered."

Vance
Athens, Georgia

"I recently purchased your InvisiClues for Starcross and want to thank you for your fast service. In this hurry up and wait world, it is refreshing to receive something before it was expected. Hurray for you."

Barbara
Ontario, California

On Zork

"Zork is so much better than Adventure ... I finally got smart and moved on to Zork. My smartest move yet."

"This is so much fun I have to force myself to stop. I enjoy it far more than my other Adventure games, even without the graphics."

"Like living inside a novel, kind of makes you feel like Alice in Wonderland."

On Suspended

"This is sure to be another big hit as all your software is. Best game so far!"

"Excellent. You did it again!"

"The hardest of all your adventures. I loved every minute of it."

"I'm becoming emotionally involved with my robots."

"Another unique idea from one of the greatest software companies ..."

"Keep 'em coming."

"I'll be waiting for the next science-fiction game."

"The best! You must now produce games faster, because nothing but Infocom is worth playing!"

"Another Infocom winner."

"Love it. Marvelous packaging. Makes even pirates want to buy it."

"Creative packaging, extremely playable."

"Outstanding."

"Superb graphic quality of packaging, manual, map and pieces was unexpected but very pleasurable."

"I like the hint computer."

"Excellent."

"Suspended is a deep, involving, and extremely tough adventure. Highest praise for it and all the Infocom line."

"Infocom never disappoints. Yours are the only adventures I purchase now."

"Perhaps the best yet."

"So far, the game is intriguing, fascinating, enjoyable, superbly written, addicting, witty, engrossing, fun."

"Awesome! You guys aren't kidding when you say the game takes place in your mind."

"Incredible!"

"Outstanding! Challenging -- this is what a game should encompass."

Many of you have asked who we are, how many of us there are, etc. Above is the answer. Mike, the founder, is sitting in front center holding a bumper sticker.

Mike started the Zork Users Group in October of 1981. He had been working at the MIT Lab for Computer Science and part-time for Infocom as the game-tester (their first paid employee). When Infocom began selling games in 1980, our Mikie began answering requests for hints. He convinced Infocom to produce the map and poster for Zork I.

In September 1981, Mike left Cambridge to attend the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before leaving, Infocom offered to allow him to set up the Users Group to continue supporting the games. Mike accepted and planned to run the operation from his dormitory room in Chicago.

During the one week Mike spent with his parents in Milwaukee before starting classes, his father Bob (standing at back left), who had retired only a few months before, suggested that he could handle the day-to-day order filling in his spare time at home in Milwaukee. So, the post office box, bank accounts, etc. were established there.

It was a small, frugal operation for the first six to nine months. The mailing list of about 1000 names was kept on 3" x 5" cards. Mike's mother, Marion (standing at back right holding Zork III), maintained the mailing list and handled the requests for price lists. Mike took care of accounting, taxes, planning, product development, advertising, mass mailings, ... , and answered all the hint requests.

He was getting quite bored explaining what to do about the Thief, and giving the answer to the riddle. He wanted to do hint booklets if only he could find a way which would be easy to use without spoiling any part of the games for anyone. After months of searching for a solution, he came across an invisible printing process and InvisiClues were born.

With the introduction of InvisiClues, the expansion of Infocom's product line, and the growth of personal computers, demands on the Zork Users Group were growing. After Mike and his parents spent three weeks printing and typing 4000 mailing labels by hand for the August 1982 mailing, it became clear that the Zork Users Group needed to join the computer age.

Steve (front left, holding Zork I map), Mike's best friend from high school, was writing database systems for the insurance industry. He began working as a consultant for the Zork Users Group, writing a system to handle order entry and to maintain customer records. An IBM-PC with a 10mb Davong hard disk was purchased. [Anyone interested in information on this software should contact the Zork Users Group.]

Once the software was ready for use in January of 1983, the customer list and order information had to be input. Mary (standing in back middle holding Starcross), Mike's former next-door neighbor, and Sharon (front right holding Suspended), who used to work with Marion, were hired to type in the information (which had grown to 10,000 names). Once the information was keyed in, Mary and Sharon stayed on to help out with the daily orders and relieve Mike's parents, who were "working harder than they ever had in all their lives."

So there they are: the people who handle 300-400 orders a week plus 50-100 information requests. They remain semi-anonymous to protect their sanity -- since the Users Group is operated out of a home, they can't get away from the phone. Desperate Zorkers have been known to call Infocom in the middle of the night from as far away as Australia.

P.S. Amazing as it may seem to those of you addicted to Infocom adventures, Mike remains the only one of the six above who has ever played any part of any of the games.

The same issue of Softalk (April 1983) featured an excellent review of Suspended (p. 155). To sum up a one page review is difficult, but a few quotes may help:

"Berlyn has succeeded in devising an adventure that is so absorbing, so compelling in the pleasure of achieving, that you can play it again and again."

"Suspended is an intelligent, logical, well-plotted, compelling, and absorbing, challenging and satisfying text adventure that begs to be played over and over again. What more can an intelligent adventurer ask?"

We know addresses for only about 20% of those who have purchased Infocom games, so there are undoubtedly more countries from which we haven't heard.

Occasionally Infocom experiences a delay on a game introduction for a particular machine (as recently happened with the Atari Suspended, with the TRS-80 Zork II and Zork III, and with all the Commodore 64 games). There have also been occasions when Infocom has back-orders due to unexpectedly heavy demand. In all of these cases we ship your order as soon as is humanly possible.

The exceptions are a small minority of orders. The Zork Users Group maintains a healthy game inventory for all machines. We have never run out of maps, InvisiClues, bumper stickers, T-shirts or posters, and, barring a disaster, we will not run out of any of these items (with the possible exception of posters).

Thanks to André St-Aubin for transcribing and HTML-izing this issue.