Near a busy thruway, on the second floor of a large multi-story building, is a place that manufactures dreams: Infocom. Their new location, a carpeted art deco suite of offices and cubbyholes, is where adventures are created and produced for an eager public.
It is whisper quiet here. I am introduced to Brian Moriarty, the author of Wishbringer, who interrupts his new project to welcome me to Infocom. His tiny cubicle is personalized to the taste of a highly creative writer and programmer who has been around computers since before micros. He's an animated speaker, and talks in glowing praise of what it means to write an Infocom adventure.
"We don't clutter up the programs with pictures," he says, referring to the graphics-style adventures that mainstayed the markets of other micros in the past. "We let the words and descriptions tell our stories."
It's true. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a new Infocom offering for the Amiga, is a rollicking compliment to British author Douglas Adams' wry wit and general distaste for the mundane. Not a single byte is given to graphics, but the "pictures" are as eloquent as murals.
The computer in Brian's office is actually a terminal connected to a climate-controlled traditional mainframe coyly referred to as "Mother". The games are written in a sort of universal interpreter, which in turn writes the machine-specific coding that becomes the adventure.
"Each adventure is its own universe," I am told, as we stroll down the corridors, popping in on assorted authors in various stages of their work. "Sometimes it takes more than one disk to tell the whole story, like Zork, for example."
Zork was originally written as a hacker's improvement on the concept of the original adventure, a noun/verb affair that offered little true interaction. It evolved into such a huge program that it had to be divided into three episodes of one compete disk each. Zork for the Amiga is ultra streamlined and sentence sensitive, as in "Get the ax and kill the dwarf," or "Roll up the rug and raise the trap door."
At the end of the corridor is an empty, silent room, an old computers' home and a graveyard for "dead" computers. There is a Dragon 64 from Tano, which never made it to general use, a couple of TRS-80 Model I's and a model III, some Sinclairs, an early Apple, assorted Commodores and Atari's, even a Tandy Color Computer. Infocom adventures are compatible with all these machines and a few more. Across the hallway is a room full of IBM PCs and their clones, a "McApple" and a sparkling new Amiga. The Amiga is surrounded by enthusiastic Infocom staffers trying out a new game. Needless to say, with ten minutes of hands-on experience and a screenful of Wishbringer, I was hooked.
In my brief visit to Infocom, I discovered the secret to their quiet yet phenomenal success: The people of the company, from the woman at the front door who answers the phone, to the MIT hacker alumni who prowl the corridors and depths of Mother's memory core. They are the soul of each adventure that bears the company logo. Theirs is a pride born of ability and the refusal to market anything but excellence - an attitude that carries over to the consumer who plays each game knowing he is not being looked down upon.
In the Infocom dream factory's quest for the consummate adventure, it is the consumer who is, ultimately, always the winner.