Welcome Games Forum Sierra Wanted Links
History The People Articles Game List Collecting Magazine Multimedia Memorabilia Catalogs
HELLO





























  
The Birth of an Industry by Ken Williams (Page 2)
  

By late 1979, Scott had already programmed five new adventure games for the TRS-80. All right!! I borrowed a TRS-80 from work and Roberta and I started enjoying Scott�s work. Scott really didn�t change the style of the game from what had been done in the original adventure. You still typed in two-word sentences and the computer typed back your location. The plot had changed but the game was the same. Roberta loved the games but wondered if they wouldn�t be better if, instead of a textural description, there would be a picture. Instead of reading, "You are standing in front of a house," why not just show a picture of the house? Anyone who knows Roberta will tell you that, once she sets her mind about something, it�s sure to happen. The Apple II was starting to catch up to the TRS-80. I wanted my own personal computer to start programming a FORTRAN compiler. Roberta thought I should help her program her vision of an adventure game with graphics. Our gift to each other for Christmas 1979 was an Apple II computer. For only $2,000, I was able to buy 64K of memory, a floppy disk drive which held almost 85K (!) of data, and a monochrome monitor. Roberta then bought me dinner at a local steak place and proceeded to describe her game idea. There would be a haunted house. You would be trapped overnight with seven other people, on of whom would be a killer. Roberta wanted pictures of every room in the house and would write the story and draw the pictures, if i would write the program. As Roberta talked, she grow more and more excited. Her voice rose in volume. People around us in the Restaurant started staring as she depicted for me how each of the characters would die. I was a bit embarassed; she caught my attention. For a television show recently, I got to play a little of the game she described that night, Mystery House. The pictures are black-and-white outlines resembling the drawings a six-year-old child might make on a chalk board given only a few minutes while teacher was out of the room. Game play was unchanged from the original Adventure; but, now you could see where you were. The picture even changed, based on what you typed. For instance, if you were looking at the front of the house and said OPEN DOOR, the picture would be completely redrawn with the front door now open. By typing GO DOOR, you would be trapped within the house and the fun would begin. Driving from store to store, Roberta and I sold MMysteryHouse ourselves. We even called Scott Adams and started selling his games, too, as well as our own. Covering the west coast was easy in those days. You could stop at every computer store west of the Rockies and only have to leave your car eight times. I doubt Crowther and Wood never realized that they were creating a whole industry. Another company was born out of MIT at the same time, Infocom. While Roberta and I were eexpandingthe definition of an adventure game to include graphics, Infocom was working on improving how you communicated with the game. Instead of simple expressions like OPEN MAILBOX, you could suddenly type in more complex sentences, like OPEN THE MAILBOX AND LOOK INSIDE. TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE BLUE FEATHER. Infocom hit the big time with games like Zork, Suspended, and Wish Bringer. Thanks to their great game design, the intelligence of their text parser, and packaging innovation, they took the industry by storm.

   Page 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5