(c) _The Boston Globe_ Magazine, May 6, 1984 MASTERS OF THE GAME _Behind some of the most challenging computer games are minds fascinated by the "real and kinda goofy."_ BY RICHARD DYER It was about nine o'clock on a rainy night when I made the fatal mistake. The doorbell rang. I saw a figure lurking outside. There was a flash of light and an explosion. Mortal pain radiated from my heart, blood flooded my lungs, a scream filled my brain. The last thing I saw was the green screen of my Kaypro II computer, telling me all this was my own fault, telling me what I should have done before it was too late. Actually it wasn't my fault; my assassin was the twisting imagination of Stu Galley, creator of _The Witness_, the computer game I was playing. Instead of being shipped off to the morgue, I could pick my bloodied body up off the floor, go back outside the Linder estate, begin at the beginning, and play through the story again, pitting my wits for hours on end against the widowed Mr. Linder; his daughter, the knockout heiress Monica; the sullen grifter Stiles, lover of the late Mrs. Linder; the mysterious Oriental manservant Phong. Not to mention Galley and his colleagues at Infocom, Inc., the Cambridge company that thought up _The Witness_ and 10 other computer games. Infocom's games dominate the lists of best-selling recreational software and have pushed the company's annual sales to more than $6 million in the less than five years of its existence. _The Witness_ comes in a folder with a warning: "Somebody's going to take the deep six. You've got a bird's-eye lowdown on the caper . . . and 12 hours to crack the case." Inside is a police file filled with information the player -- the detective, you -- might need. There's a telegram from Mr. Linder urging you to come by. There's a floor plan of his house. There's a copy of Mrs. Linder's suicide note: "Tell your illustrious father how deeply I regret soiling one of his precious revolvers." There is a matchbook with a phone number scrawled inside, a pulpy _National Detective Gazette_, and two pages of a newspaper from Santa Ana, California, dated February 1, 1938. There, buried among the actual local news and human interest stories of the day ("Man Works Many Years with Broken Neck"), you will find a short column about the death of Mrs. Linder. After you have studied these items, read the instructions, and loaded up the disc drive of your computer, the story begins to print out on the screen. "Storm clouds are swimming across the sky," the computer tells you. "Your favorite pistol, a snub-nosed Colt .32, is snug in its holster." You are the principal character in the story, and at this moment your options open. The doorbell glows, "almost daring you to ring it." "Ring the doorbell," you type into your computer. Phong answers the door. Soon enough, in the words of the package, "you're left with a stiff and a race against the clock to nail your suspect...." With every question you ask, you get further entangled in webs of motive and alibi, clues and red herrings, truth and lies. The outcome of the story is affected by the decisions you make as you interact with the characters, who have programmed minds and motives of their own. Through the keyboard you can question them, follow them, search them, accuse them, confront them, even smell them and rub them, though they won't like that. The computer reprimands you when you have succumbed to your baser impulses, when you try to kiss a suspect, when you have "sunk to a new low." You can case the joint (under the bed there may be clues, or only dust), test documents for fingerprints, or send evidence to the lab for analysis. There are also some things you can't do, or rather that the game can't. It can "recognize" a vocabulary of up to 1000 words, but if you are tempted to get into the 1930s mood of the thing and call the snub-nosed Colt a "piece," the computer won't know what you are talking about. The machine constantly tells you that you can't ask questions like that, that it doesn't know the word you're using, that you don't need to do certain things to solve the mystery. The problems of solving the case have a certain logical complexity, but the simplicity of the tools available for sorting through the problems makes the game still more complicated and confusing. The situations engage your full problem-solving imagination, but you must exercise it in the vocabulary of Dick and Jane; it sometimes seems as if Puff and Spot could sniff out the clues faster. But the process soon gets to be interactively addictive. You learn the rules of the game. (After all, you play tennis with a court and a net that interfere with your freedom of movement.) And, as one Infocom staffer puts it, "You'd pay a lot more to play this game with a _live_ storyteller." It can take weeks to work through to the end of an Infocom "participatory novel"; 30 hours' playing time is a good average. The wife of one "detective" pulled the diskette out of the family computer and threw it into the fireplace to get her husband's attention. Astronaut Sally Ride told _People_ magazine that _Zork_, Infocom's first game, a fantasy adventure, was driving her to her knees. Playing one Infocom game almost invariably leads to another ($39.95 to $69.95 apiece in computer stores, hobby shops, department stores, bookstores, and, of course, by mail), which is precisely what the company intends to have happen. "This business began as a lark," says staff writer Dave Lebling, "and it is looking less larky every day. We are taking serious money in, and we are putting serious money out. All to make games." Infocom was founded just under five years ago by eight young men at MIT who kicked a few hundred dollars each into their new company, which operated out of a post-office box in Kendall Square. Today there are 50 full-time employees, a bulletin board full of job postings, and the regular annexing of additional carpeted acreage in a high-tech office building hidden behind the filling stations and shopping malls off Route 2. The decal on the door proclaims "Imagination Sold and Serviced Here." The electric bill for just the mighty DEC 2060 computer that blinks and hums away in the basement runs to $1500 a month, "about what it would be," says vice president Marc Blank, "if you lived in Buckingham Palace, or if you were running an aluminum smelter." At the beginning Infocom had one concrete asset, _Zork_, a game that a few hackers, or computer nuts, had developed in their spare time in MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. The hackers also had their own apparently limitless energies and imaginations. They had written _Zork_ -- in computerese, they had "implemented" it -- for the fun of doing it, and without any thought of the game's commercial potential. For one thing, there weren't any commercial possibilities in 1977, before the explosion of the home computer market. The ancestor of _Zork_ was a game called _Adventure_, which was implemented by staffers and students in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. _Adventure_ is a Dungeons & Dragons-type story; the player participates by typing into the computer simple two-word commands like "Go North" and "Hit Troll." Blank, Lebling, and Tim Anderson were working in MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when _Adventure_ arrived. "For a couple of weeks, dozens of people were playing the game and feeding each other clues," Lebling recalls. "Everyone was asking you in the hallway if you had gotten past the snake yet." But several players who had begun the game with excitement finished with irritation. They wanted something else to play, and there wasn't anything else. "It was like reading a Sherlock Holmes story, and you wanted to read another one of them immediately," one of the players says. "Only there wasn't one, because nobody had written it." The people at the MIT lab also thought they could do better, so between the spring of 1977 and the end of 1978, they set to work constructing _Zork_. MIT did not officially object, because no one officially asked for permission to work on _Zork_. "The attitude was that as long as nothing was stopping people from being productive, it was good for morale, as long as people did it on their own time," Blank says. "The game was always restricted from use during regular working hours." Doing better involved developing a more sophisticated way for the player to communicate with the computer. "When you can play with only two words," Blank explains, "it's clumsy. You are limited in the stories and types of problems you can come up with. Necessity was the mother of invention; we wanted to put adjectives and prepositions into the parser, which is the part of the game through which the player communicates with the game's environment. Each new addition we made to _Zork_ required an enhancement of the parser." How the parser works, let alone how anyone would set about "enhancing" it, is not a subject the people from Infocom discuss in public. The parser is a part of the company's proprietary technology that keeps it ahead of the competition in an industry in which the concept of copyright doesn't protect very much. All anyone will say just goes to make alphabet soup. The games are based on a new computer language known as ZIL ("Zork Interactive Language"), which is apparently a cousin to a "machine-independent" language that Blank was developing at MIT called MDL (or "Muddle"). MDL itself is a descendant of another computer language called LISP (from list processing). Talk about muddle. The important thing is that _Zork_ became an immediate hit at MIT and at computer labs around the country -- anywhere there was a machine with a million bytes of memory to work from and a roomful of cyborgs eager to play. In its sophistication, _Zork_ bore about the same relationship to _Adventure_ as the splashiest arcade games do to the little white light that bounced through the primitive _Pong._ By 1979, home computers had became a major marketplace reality, so Blank and his colleagues began to consider the problem of crunching their game down to the size a household machine could handle and the related problem of how to make it play on different and incompatible brands of computers. The solutions they came up with became Infocom's second proprietary technology. Each game is currently available in versions fitted to the machines of 18 different manufacturers, with a couple more in the wings. In the beginning, hardly anyone worked full-time for the new company. Blank, for example, was still finishing up his medical training at the Albert Einstein Medical School in New York; the others were still in various degree programs at MIT. The atmosphere surrounding Infocom's activities was informal; implementers asked their roommates to test the new games, and the roommates in turn became fired with the desire to write their own. Yet at the same time, the management and marketing team was always aggressively and thoroughly professional. Today the chairman of the board is Albert Vezza, a senior scientist at MIT who developed the US Postal Service's electronic mail system and taught many of Infocom's wunderkinder. The president of the company is Joel Berez, who has degrees in both computer science and management. He was instrumental in tying Infocom to its first distributor, which dropped _Zork_ as incompatible with its businesslike image, and subsequently in developing the company into a full-scale independent operation. Now Infocom has 11 games on the market, with a twelfth scheduled for immediate release. The games fall into several categories, which parallel the genres of popular fiction. _Enchanter_ and _Sorcerer_ ("Gaze now into the amulet of Aggthora and let be revealed the one valorous enough to rescue the land and earn the title of Sorcerer") are in the fantasy tradition of _Zork_; so, not surprisingly, are _Zork II_ and _Zork III_. In addition to _The Witness_, there is another mystery called _Deadline_, in which Inspector Klutz takes you off the case if you haven't solved it within 12 hours. _Infidel_ is the first of a projected series called "Tales of Adventure." It takes place around and in a pyramid in Egypt in the 1920s, and it was developed with the aid of a Harvard pyramid specialist. There are three science-fiction titles: _Suspended_, reputedly the most challenging of the Infocom games to play, _Starcross_, and _Planetfall_, which features Floyd, the most popular Infocom character, a robot "with the mentality of an encyclopedia and the maturity of a 9-year-old." Infocom people smile knowingly when you ask them about the possibility of Westerns or spy stories. They joke about the idea of a romance series; somehow the moves don't seem appropriate to a computer keyboard. "We haven't had a flop yet," says Linda Lawrence, who until last month was the company's marketing communications coordinator. "It will not be a fun day if anything ever does." So far these games are the work of five staff writers. The rest of the company works on testing, research and development, product support, and marketing. The writers share an obvious technical competence and familiarity with the artifacts of pop culture. "There was a time when I had read every science-fiction book," one writer says, "but now I read only the good ones." Otherwise they are as different from one another as the games they have invented. Bruce Schechter, 29, is probably in the best position to tell you what it's like to start from the beginning, because he's the new kid on the block, and he just started working for the company as Infocom's sixth staff writer. Schechter earned his Ph.D. in physics but found he liked writing better. He was working as a science feature writer for _Discover_ magazine when a colleague there wrote an article about Infocom. Schechter decided the company sounded like his kind of place. "The night before my interview I stayed up until two in the morning to finish _Deadline_," he recalls. "After I got the job, the first thing I had to do was learn the fundamentals of the language ZIL. Then I made a miniature game. It had five rooms, one madman, and one banana -- and the goal of the game was to make him slip on the peel. Now I am working on the first little tiny corner of my new game, which I'm setting in a railroad car. It's almost like a character, because of all the things I have to think about. If there's a window, then I have to know what would happen if someone decides to look through it. If there are curtains, they must open and shut -- I have to consider what the reasonable consequences of that might be. The other guys can finish a game in about nine months, but at this point," be says, his voice trailing off in perplexity, "the whole notion of finishing...." High-strung, chain-smoking Michael Berlyn, 34, the inventor of _Suspended_ and _Infidel_, was the first game writer not drawn from the original MIT inner circle. He came to Infocom from the worlds of rock music and popular fiction; framed covers from his paperback books (_Crystal Phoenix_ and _Integrated Man_) hang on the wall, and a series of Tom Swift, Jr., books is stacked on his office bookshelf. The name of the Colorado company he founded before he came to Infocom tells you something about his sense of humor: Sentient Software. Berlyn says he can describe the difference between writing a paperback original and an Infocom game only in terms of an analogy: "A bicycle can get you from New York to LA, so will a jet plane. In one sense they are the exact same thing; in another they are nothing alike. In one sense we are working within traditional genres -- mystery, fantasy, science fiction -- and in another we are still teaching ourselves, laying out the groundwork for what these things could be. For the most part, we are working without pioneers. In our own way we are like Louis L'Amour or Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett. "The experience of playing one of the games," Berlyn says, "is the same as when you read a good book or see a brilliant movie -- _you are there_. Most fiction manipulates you; it is a passive experience. With these games we go one step further: The games do manipulate you, but at the same time you are having an _active_ experience, and you exert control over your environment. How much? At this point I'd say that you have more control than you'd think, and less than we'd like." Cheerful Dave Lebling, 34, one of the creators of _Zork_, went on to write a science-fiction adventure called _Starcross_ and is now working on a new mystery game. Unlike his colleagues, he has retained his affiliation with MIT and works for Infocom only part-time. "The way we start here is to write up a treatment, a 10- to 20-page plot outline with events and characters. Then we show it around and work cooperatively. So far there is no game that is 100 percent the work of one person. It is very useful to have people around to say, 'That's _terrible_.' We begin with plot ideas and then express them in the vocabulary of the system -- rooms, objects, and directions. The way we work here is to see a limitation and then see what we can do to get around it. At this point we are up against a wall: the size of home computers and how much information they can handle. Within that limitation our direction has gone from treasure-hunting to problem-solving, from an exercise in computer programming into something very like real fiction, with mysteries, characters, and what Alfred Hitchcock called 'McGuffins.' Right now I am working on a new mystery with more than a dozen suspects -- the plot is like a vat of eels, _wriggling_." Tall, shambling Steve Meretzky, 27, is the creator of _Planetfall_ and _Sorcerer_, and he is the author of three _Zork_ paperback book spinoffs. "I started by play-testing games before they were released -- that's when Infocom had two full-time employees and worked out of an 8-by-10 office in Faneuil Hall. I'd play the games on the Apple at home and report bugs," Meretzky says, "and before long I was itching to write my own game. I'd read science fiction all my life, so it was only natural that I'd come up with something like _Planetfall_. Right now I'm about to start something new -- a collaboration with a well-known science-fiction writer, adapting a book of his into a game. Our immediate goal is to add vocabulary, more text, a bigger geography, more objects. The system is so flexible and powerful that you can do most of what you want to do, if you are willing to take the time. I have no vision of where it all might lead, but I can imagine adding pictures and then sound, even smell and touch, eventually. Just like in a dream, only real." My own nemesis, the creator of _The Witness_, is bearded, professorial Stu Galley, 39, who came to the game-writing process a bit more reluctantly than the others. At CalTech and MIT he resisted learning about computers: "I wondered what they could do that would be more interesting than number-crunching." He thought _Zork_ was okay, but he wasn't particularly interested in fantasy. But Marc Blank's mystery _Deadline_ hooked him; he planned _The Witness_ as a kind of complement. _Deadline_ is set in the East, on a summer day; _The Witness_ is set at night, on the West Coast. "It was my idea to make it a period piece," says Galley. "I got a Sears catalogue from the 1930s, and that is how I furnished Mr. Linder's house. I looked up expressions in dictionaries of slang like _I Hear America Speaking_. I even got ahold of the _Los Angeles Times_ for the day the story takes place; if you decide to turn the radio on during the game, it will be playing exactly what the radio was playing at that time of day. That's what appeals to me -- it's all real, and kinda goofy." Despite his good humor in talking about _The Witness_, now agreeably in his past, Galley doesn't look like a happy man. He is in the terminal stages of what everyone says is the least favorite part of the game-building operation -- the final debugging of a new one. Staffers at Infocom are paid to beat up on the games, and there are outside testers as well. Solving every problem that a player turns up has a way of creating a chain reaction of whole new problems. "Right now," Galley says, "I am not enjoying this at all. But you should also say that this new game, _Seastalker_, may be the best thing we've ever done. It's our first juvenile, planned for kids 9 and up. The story is about a famous young inventor like Tom Swift." _Seastalker_ is a collaborative venture with a man named Jim Lawrence, who has written a number of "Hardy Boys" and "Tom Swift" books. Blank, who was only 22 when he helped create _Zork_ and who is now 29, went on to collaborate with Lebling on the other parts of the _Zork_ trilogy, _Zork II_ and _Zork III_, and to develop "our first game that wasn't a _Zork_ -- _Deadline_." Tall, thin, and sharp as a razor even after a red-eye express flight from the West Coast, Blank's wide-ranging talk indicates that he never was exclusively interested in games -- his M.D. degree hangs on the wall, together with a Phi Beta Kappa certificate and a Tanglewood poster. He describes his present job as a "mishmosh" of programming and design, supervisory work, and the devising of corporate strategy. "Sometimes it seems that all I do is interviews anymore," he says, sighing. Infocom has research divisions now, but what it is up to is none of an interviewer's business -- part of it has to do with computer graphics, part with business software, and some of it with theoretical explorations that could underpin all the Infocom products and projects. Like Berlyn, Blank enjoys the swaggering pioneer aspect of Infocom. "It's not as if other people were doing what we do," Blank says, "and we were making me-too products. Of course, the games are in one sense primitive -- they depend on a primitive technology that will certainly advance. Right now we are hampered by the capacities of home computers. But who knows, in five years they may squeeze the equivalent of our main frame computer onto a chip that costs 100 bucks. In the meantime, we can have only about 25,000 words of text -- about the length of a novella. But no player would ever see all of it on one pass. A lot of the text is there to take care of unusual moves on the player's part -- it's there for the wrong turns. If you were to look at the best solution (and many of the games have more than 20 possible endings) and took the quickest possible way, the text might be only a few thousand words. The challenge, for us, is to come up with a story whose plot has a lot of stretch in it. You can't think of it in terms of writing a linear story. You write it from the end backwards, putting in branches; if the player does certain things, then other things will happen later." Each game has added complexity to its predecessors, but Blank doesn't think of them as superseding one another. He does admit that the company goes back to earlier games to correct the problems that players have found in them -- _Zork_ is now in its seventy-fifth version. But the company hasn't yet rewritten any actual game problem in light of subsequent developments in technology. "You can't change _Zork_," says Lawrence. "After all," she says, clearly horrified by the thought, "it's _historic_." Blank emphasizes that each game stands on its own, and that each fulfills the criteria of _any_ successful game -- including those played with cards or on a board: "We like to judge ourselves by the classic games, the really good ones like Monopoly or Risk. A game should be interesting and fair; it should have feedback, so you have a way of knowing whether you are doing well. It should have replay value, so it is fun the second, third, and tenth time that you play it. Our games should serve the same function as any entertainment does -- provide diversion for people that could use some. I think our games are _good_ entertainment because they are not mindless; they are mind-exercising entertainment. They are not intended to be educational or spiritually uplifting; they are intended to be fun." Obviously, thousands of people have found that the Infocom games are fun. More than 130,000 copies of _Zork_ have been sold, and the three _Zork_ games together have sold more than a quarter-million copies -- more than the home versions of arcade games like _Lode Runner_ and _Zaxxon_, which both depend on graphics. Infocom takes a lofty view of its independence from graphics; its publicity stresses that the human imagination, awakened by the games, "makes any picture that's ever come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison." Michael Dornbrook, Infocom's product manager, says that there are now 1.8 million computers in American homes, and the evidence is that the company has penetrated into half a million of those homes. "Our joke," he says, "is that we have penetrated them all, if you count the pirated games." Statistical studies show that adults play the games (75 percent of the players are over age 25), that most of the players are heavy readers, and that 80 percent of players are men. "We have a much stronger base among females than other computer software and than computer magazines, but it is still an area we want to work on," Dornbrook says. "The mysteries are more popular with women than the science-fiction games. We don't know what the results of a Western or an espionage game might be because we don't have them." He points out that the company is very sensitive to the concerns of the people who play the games: One ending of _Infidel_ was altered because early players felt that it unfairly rewarded an ethnic bias. The fast-talking Dornbrook, 30, came into the company as a game tester. "Before _Zork_, computer games seemed frivolous to me. It took the whole huge system at MIT to run something like _Pong_; the joystick hadn't even been invented yet. I played _Zork_ and fell in love with it immediately, but I didn't tell anyone that because I wanted them to keep on paying me to play it. After a while they started passing on to me letters begging for help. I got $2 for every question I answered. I developed a map for _Zork_ and founded the Zork Users Group, which I ran out of my apartment through the mail. By the time that was absorbed by Infocom, about a year ago, there were 20,000 members, and four employees were filling 1000 orders a week for the game, the T-shirts, and the 'I'd Rather Be Zorking' bumper stickers." Dornbrook has been very active in product development and support. Elaborate packaging, like that for _The Witness_, has turned out to be very helpful to the game writers. To begin with, it means every piece of information doesn't have to be in the computer system itself. Some of the who, what, where, when, and why can be on paper, leaving the computer free to deal with what Lawrence calls the "worms." All the package items -- the matchbook, the map, the telegram in _The Witness_ -- become part of the fun of the game as well. They have had the unexpected and beneficial side effect of discouraging piracy. Since Infocom caught on to this, it has done its part to keep it going: The package items, designed by Giardini/Russell in Watertown, are printed in peculiar colors and on oddly folded paper, so anyone who wants to photocopy them has a problem. One of Dornbrook's most popular innovations has been the development of hint books for each of the games. These provide leading questions for a player to ask during the progress of a game, with answers of increasing suggestivity that are printed as "InvisiClues," which you can read only by drawing a special chemical pen over them. "I spent two months calling all over the country trying to find invisible ink," he says. "I called publishers and printing magazines and every other place you could think of before I finally went back to A. B. Dick, which is where I started. They didn't know what I was talking about until I finally said something that clicked. 'Oh, you mean our _latent image_ process.' I still don't know what it is, except that it is citrus-activated and nontoxic and that your kid could eat the marker without killing himself." As Dornbrook speaks, a message blinks behind him on his computer screen. It says, "Plug that Prose." The glassy offices of Infocom look like a high-tech company, but the atmosphere is more what you would expect in a college dormitory. There is even a _Casablanca_ poster in the back of Meretzky's aquarium. The staff dresses casually, and it appears as if some of them have slept in their clothes, if they have slept at all; they cultivate an image at once laid back and hassled, as many undergraduates do. They pop in and out of one another's offices and moan over game problems as if the solutions were an overdue term paper, and they had just pulled an all-nighter. When you get Infocom employees together there is frequent hilarity, but you can tell they are on their guard because there's a stranger around. There are things they can't talk about for competitive reasons, and they can make quite a condescending show of explaining things to an outsider. At the same time, any outsider would immediately get a sense of how Infocom is a community effort, of how the personalities complement one another, of how much fun they find in their work -- the same fun that makes the games so compulsively playable. Over pizza and soft drinks incongruously served on a boardroom table, the group put on quite a performance. Question: "Where does the name _Zork_ come from?" "It's my middle name," says Blank. "It's my maiden name," says Berlyn. "Marc ate three pizzas all by himself, and when he stood up he belched, 'Zork,'" says Meretzky, belching. "Actually," says Blank, calming down, "it's just a nonsense word. There are all kinds of words like that that hackers tend to use -- words like 'frob.' Frob means thingamajig, and it can be used as any part of speech. It's a generic noun and verb. Cars are full of frobs that get frobbed. That's why we named the wizard in _Zork II_ the Wizard of Frobozz. He's forgotten all his spells, except for the ones that begin with the letter _F_." Question: "Why is it all of you find debugging the most unpleasant part of implementing a game?" "The major feeling of debugging," says Berlyn, "is not one of creativity. These are the most complex game applications around, and as such they are interdependent, like a house of cards. I don't mean that they are unstable, but they _are_ interdependent. If you want to turn around one of the cards, you have to do it _very_ carefully." "Actually," says Meretzky, "the first part of debugging is exciting; it's the first feedback. Somebody is actually playing _your_ game. But by the end, you get sick of the little problems. You have spent three months inventing the game, and now you have to spend just as much time cleaning it up. The worst bug that ever got out was in _Zork III_: it actually prevented you from finishing the game. The last problem puts you in a prison cell, and you have to tell the dungeon master, several rooms away, to push a button on a control panel in order to go into the next room, where you will win the treasure of Zork, Fame, and Fortune. If you still had your sword with you, the game would simply crash. We call things like that our 'fatal errors'; we caught that one relatively early on." "We shouldn't call them fatal errors," says Berlyn. "There's no gross damage done. If you buy a washing machine, bring it home, plug it in, put your clothes in, and the sucker blows up, you're looking at flood damage, short circuits, possible electrocution ... and mangled wash. If you hit a bug in one of our games, all it leads to is progressive dementia." Question: "How long have you had your own computer?" "Santa dropped it off at Christmas in 1982," Blank says. "Before that we rented time from Digital. It was pretty slow." "Y-y-y-e-s-s-s," drawls Berlyn, sounding just like Hal the computer in Stanley Kubrick's film _2001: A Space Odyssey_. Question: "What sorts of research have gone into the games, apart from what was playing on the radio in Los Angeles on February 1, 1938?" "Everything in these invented worlds is consistent," says Blank "In the science-fiction stories everything is consistent with scientific laws." "Floyd, the robot in _Planetfall_, was the result of research into how an artificially intelligent mind might work," says Meretzky. "For _Infidel_ we hired a pyramid specialist," says Berlyn. "It was a mummy." Question: "What famous people apart from Sally Ride play Infocom games?" "That's hard to answer," says Lawrence. "Famous people don't ordinarily bring up the games they play in interviews unless you ask them to." But the others supply the names of a couple of Infocom fans -- John Gardner, the novelist who is continuing Ian Fleming's James Bond series, and Douglas Adams, the author of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_. "And don't forget Timothy Leary," says Berlyn. "He certainly understood the fractured reality concept of _Suspended_. I couldn't rip him away from the machine, and all he had to say was, 'And this is _legal_?'" [end]