infocom/articles/YC-87.txt

The following two articles appeared in the 'Your Computer' magazine,
back in 1987. Some of the details look a bit strange to me, but I
still think they are quite interesting, as well as amusing.

Torbj|rn Andersson, d91tan@Minsk.DoCS.UU.SE



Your Computer, March 1987 Vol 7, No. 3

Infocom special
Roger Garret's Adventureline

  The first few weeks after Christmas are not easy for an adventure
reviewer, mainly because software houses always try to release any new
game for the Christmas rush, which is understandable, but it leaves
January and February devoid of new material.
  The only consolation for the unhappy state of events is that it
allows one to write about one's special preferences and lean very much
towards Infocom adventures, so this month I offer a kind of Infocom
potpourri.
  My first indication that such brilliant adventures existed was from
reading the late lamented _Micro_ _Adventurer_. Going through the
problem page I would read such questions as "How do I cross the
river?" or "How do I open the egg?" in Zork I. I never gave the games
much thought as at the time I was busy with other games like _The_
_Hobbit,_ _Twin_ _Kingdom_ _Valley_ and the Brian Howorth _Mysterious_
_Adventures_ series, plus anything else I could lay my hands on and
because the Infocom games were disc only and I had only a CBM64 without
disc drive I continued to devote myself to cassette-based games.
  It was not until an article appeared in MAD extolling the brilliance
of these games that I decided to buy a disc drive and find for myself
what all the noise was about. Little did I know that trying to buy an
Infocom game in the U.K. was like trying to find gold under Wigan
pier. Nobody stocked Infocom games. Finally I managed to track down
two, _Starcross_ and _Suspended,_ so to say my initiation into the
world of Infocom was somewhat mindboggling is to say the least.
  To me an adventure was an adventure. All this standard level
business meant nothing to me. I had solved numerous adventures so,
apart from more text why should Infocom be any different? Imagine me
with a new disc drive raring to go, pen and paper in front of me, and
then the magic words appearing on the screen of Starcross, an
interactive fiction from Infocom, typing in my first commands and then
waiting why the disc drive whirred away.
  Who cares about a slow drive, especially when I was about to solve
an Infocom game? I think I was kidding myself, I can honestly say
Starcross drove me bonkers. How my micro did not end up on the lawn is
still a mystery. It was no ordinary adventure - it was a figment of a
twisted mind sent to destroy me forever. Would I ever complete it?

Climbing Everest

  After hours and hours of frustrating enjoyment I did and what an
amazing feeling it is. I felt as if I had just climbed Everest and
from that day I still derive the same sense of satisfaction on
completing an Infocom adventure.
  To understand how Infocom came into existence we must go as far back
as 1960, when Digital Equipment Corporation created the PDP-10, a
medium-sized computer. The 10 became popular at many research stations
and a great deal of software was written for it. At the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology artificial intelligence laboratory an
operating system called Incompatible Time-Sharing System was written
for the 10. ITS was designed to make software development easy and the
designers assumed that it would have a small, knowledgeable, friendly
group of users, so they included no security features.
  In 1970, ARPAnet was invented, which enabled interaction among
virtually all computers capable of logging into the net or by knowing
a certain telephone number and, because of the lack of security
features, budding hackers from all parts of the country soon
discovered a wonderful playground. Also around 1970 a language called
Muddle - later MDL - was developed as a successor to Lisp. It never
fully replaced Lisp but it developed a loyal band of followers,
including the Dynamic Modelling Group. DM was responsible for some
famous games - only in the States - among which was a maze game in
which various players wandered round a maze shooting each other.
  Each user's screen showed the view of the maze which his
computerized alter-ego saw updated in real time. One of the chief
developers of the game was Dave Lebling. Another well-played/hacked
game was _Trivia,_ which was written - second version - by Marc Blank.

Doing it better

  In 1977 _Adventure_ swept the ARPAnet. Willie Crowther was the
original author but Don Woods expanded the game and released it on an
unsuspecting network. When Adventure arrived at MIT the reaction was
typical. Everyone spent a good deal of time doing nothing except
trying to solve the game. It is estimated that Adventure set the
entire computer industry back two weeks. Naturally the true lunatics
began to think of how they could do it better. One was Bruce Daniels,
who was the first person to get the last point, even though he had to
examine the game with a machine language debugger as there was no
other way to do it.
  By that time another hacker had joined forces with Lebling and
company, Tim Anderson, and after Lebling had devised and written a
command parser, Anderson, Blank and Daniels wrote a real adventure and
the early forms of Zork began to take shape.
  By that time Trivia was old-hat, so the multitude of hackers sat
waiting for something new. Then Zork arrived on the network and people
went bananas over it. Extras were added to the game in the next few
months. Lebling invented the now famous _Grues_ and Daniels infested
the early Zork with them.
  The first major change addition was in June, 1977. It was the river
section devised and implemented by Blank and remains unchanged to this
day. Further problems and locations were added on such as the volcano
and mine section.
  More scenarios and problems were added until the game as we know it
was finished. Until then nobody had thought of it being a commercial
proposition. The programmers were content with what they thought was
just a hobby until 1979.
  Zork was one great big computer game, about one megabyte in size -
as large as it could be and still fit in its original home, a
DECsystem-10. Blank and Lebling designed and wrote the program with
the help of Daniels and Anderson. All four had worked together in the
research dept of MIT along with other computer buffs but the team was
slowly disappearing into the real world. That created a problem. What
could the group work on together and to whom could they sell it?
  Discussions had been going on from 1976 about the potential of the
minicomputer market from a hardware and software point of view. The
group was ignoring the vast potential of the micro market, not only
from lack of experience but also from a serious concern about software
piracy.

Chinese meetings

  Enter Joel Berez. He had graduated from MIT and was working in his
family business in Pittsburgh. Blank had also taken a medical
residency in Pittsburgh and so naturally the two got together for
various outings, where invariable the talk would turn to the good old
days at MIT. One reason for the good old days was Zork. The idea of
taking Zork to more people evolved from their weekly meetings in the
local Chinese restaurant. More people were buying micros, like the
TRS-Model 1 or the Apple II, but those computers were too small to run
Zork - or were they?
  In those days when PCs ran to about 16K there was no way Zork would
fit unless some form of specially-written program was written. Finally
they concluded that, by inventing a programming system specifically
for Zork, they could fit about half of it into a computer with 32K and
one floppy disc drive.
  Meanwhile, the group at MIT was forming a corporation, choosing
Infocom as the name least offensive to everyone, and searching for a
product to start generating income for the company. There were ideas
such as systems for keeping track of documents, handling electronic
correspondence and processing text but, until Berez added Zork to the
list, nobody gave adventures a second thought.

Z-machine code

  There was still the problem of compressing the text. Berez and Blank
worked that out to create the programming tools for their design and
by the late autumn of 1977 had succeeded in creating the Z-machine
chip. The breakthrough had happened.
  The key to their design was an imaginary chip called the Z-machine.
The chip would be able to run Zork, or at least part of it, if the
program was coded in a special, very compact language. The design also
called for each personal computer to have a program to interpret the
special Z-machine language and make the computer act in the same way a
real Z-machine computer would.
  It involved creating another language called ZIL - Zork
Implementation Language. Blank built a two-stage translator program to
translate a ZIL program into the Z-machine language. He also built a
ZIP - Z-Machine Interpreter Program - so that a DECsystem 20 could
emulate the Z-machine.
  The other problem was to cut Zork in half. Lebling examined his
overall map of the Zork kingdom and, eventually, by drawing certain
boundaries, found about 100 locations which included the above-ground
scenario and the numerious locations around the round room. The rest
would be saved for another day.
  After numerous problems of copyright and distribution, Zork I hit
the streets. The rest is history.

In some of the numerous letters I receive from fellow adventurers one
question seems to be asked more often than most, apart from the
questions about games, and that is what is my favourite Infocom
adventure? Each adventure has always delighted me because each game
contains certain novel characters which leave a warm feeling.

Turtle risked it all

  For instance, who has played _Planetfall_ and not been drawn towards
Floyd, that silly little robot whose one aim was to please you? I will
bet many of you said "Oh" when he died, only to smile when he returns
at the end. Remember the mailbox in _Wishbringer_ who bravely gave his
life in your defence, or the Turtle from _Enchanter,_ who risked all
to fetch the scroll back for you and how many times have we muttered
"Oh no, not him again" when, on nearly completing a task, the Wizard
of Frobozz rears his head and casts a spell on you?
  So making a choice from the Infocom range is difficult but I have
made two choices. The first is also the first in the Enchanter series.
Called Enchanter, it introduced spell-casting into adventures,
originally to be released as Zork IV, but because of the difference in
character you play, a new trilogy was planned and called the Enchanter
trilogy. _Sorceror_ followed not long after with the final part,
_Spellbreaker,_ entering our lives in the summer of 1986.
  Enchanter produced a change in the type of character we were used to
playing - the greedy adventurer whose sole intent was to collect as
many treasures as possible, killing or maiming anybody or anything
standing in our path. In this game the only protection we had was our
trusty spellbook. Enchanter introduced fans to new words like Rezrov,
Gnusto, Gaspar, and other equally bizarre names but, more important,
spell-casting added a new dimension to the adventure. It seemed as if
the game had a mind of its own and, once having started, you were
instantly enmeshed in the subtle gameplay.

Enchanter

  The land of the Enchanters is a peaceful, pleasant place to live,
looked after by the wise Wizards who rule with wisdom and compassion.
The Great Underground Empire is now only a memory. The splendour
created by Lord Dimwit Flathead has disappeared slowly into the mists
of time. Only ruins now stand where once mighty Aqueducts and
magnificent palaces stood.
  Peace reigned until one day when from the mysterious forbidden lands
of the freezing north an evil sorceror called Krill went to dwell in
an old deserted castle not far from Frobozz. News of Krill and his
unholy sacrificial rites soon reached the ears of the Enchanters'
Guild. Various members were sent to defeat Krill but his magic was so
powerful that none of the Enchanters could defeat him. It would appear
that Krill could read minds and if there was the slightest threat an
invisible barrier would surround the castle.
  The Enchanters thought long and hard about the problem until Belboz,
and Chief Enchanter, had an idea so simple that Brains - reputedly the
brainiest of the Enchanters - cut off his beard, left the guild and
took up yak farming for not having thought of the idea. Rumour has it
he is still there to this day.
  Belboz's idea was to send a novice Enchanter to defeat Krill
because, to put it in Belboz's words, "Anybody with the brains of a
drelb, later to be known as a Dodo, should be able to approach the
castle without posing a threat to Krill." With those words of
encouragement echoing in your ears you set forth on your quest.
  Enchanter contains some of author Dave Lebling's most endearing
characters, such as the Turtle who, if you talk to him, will follow
you round and perform a most astounding feat which, believe it or not,
requires dexterity and speed - none of your common or garden type
turtle in this game. Another highlight is when you meet the lone
adventurer, a true parody with his drawn eyes looking furtively this
way and that, lantern held high, rusty sword dangling from tattered
scabbard, some long lost treasure gripped tightly in a grimy hand,
willing to do whatever you ask in return for a reward.
  Before your eventual showdown with Krill, Lebling will amaze you
with his masterful way of introducing problems, delight you with the
text descriptions, and frustrate you at the pure logic behind the
problems.
  My first choice was relatively easy, as Enchanter remains my
favorite but making my next choice was more difficult. The Zork
Trilogy stands out in my mind, as do Planetfall and Starcross, but I
feel that _Wishbringer,_ written by Brian Moriarty, must take second
place, mainly because of the freshness it brought into adventuring. It
is not a particularly difficult adventure with relatively few
locations but Moriarty's brand of humour and writing ability set it
apart from the more predictable - if you can call any work by Infocom
predictable.
  Taking a rather simple idea of returning a cat to its owner,
Moriarty sets about weaving an intricate take where one minute you are
a normal person trying to deliver a letter and then it is
tighten-your-belt time and off we go into Moriarty's fantasy world,
where talking Boots tramp around the streets, poodles turn into large
ferocious dogs, platypus live on their own island ruled by King
Platypus and a mailbox comes alive, acts like a cat, and dies bravely
defending you from another male-eating mailbox amid shouts of "Poor
little devil" and "Oh what a shame, I liked him." Such is the
involvement when playing the games that one feels as if one is the
person involved in all the dilemmas.

Wishbringer

  Life is not very exciting for a lowly postal clerk living in the old
town of Festeron. In fact, the most exciting time is watching the
traffic lights change - when they are working - which is usually every
third week in December. This day seems different. Not being able to
understand why, you trudge to your place of employment there to be
greeted by the crusty old postmaster. The Boss wants you to deliver a
letter to The Olde Magick Shop on the hill just outside the town
limits. As you leave the post office the Boss issues one last
command - "Make sure you deliver the letter before five o'clock or woe
betide you." That is just the kind of joyful message you need to help
you on your way.

No ordinary shop

  Further along the road Miss Voss entrusts you with a note for your
boss while her pet poodle distrusts you and to show his distrust sinks
a pair of needle-sharp teeth into your right ankle. After detaching
said ankle from said jaws you eventually make it to the Magick shop.
Moriarty's skill at writing grips you instantly as you open the door
and walk inside, because this is no ordinary shop.
  Scattered around are various masks, herbs and other brick-a-bat but
what hits you most is the claustrophobic atmosphere which prevails.
After delivering the letter you turn to leave when suddenly you lose
all sense of time and reason. The next thing you remember is awakening
outside the shop with the words "find my cat" ringing in your mind and
that is when your heartaches begin.

An evil transformation

  Everything has changed. What was once a boring little town is now an
evil place. Nightly patrols by the Boot Patrol are to be avoided at
all cost but if you have done an act of kindness being thrown into the
briny by the boot patrol is not too bad. As in all Infocom games there
are plenty of problems to overcome before the conclusion, such as
rescuing a princess, getting past a ferocious dog, escaping from the
cells, plus other assorted brain-teasers, but one thing for sure is
that you will enjoy yourself immensely before it is over.
  All the Infocom adventures are now being released by Activision,
which bought Infocom last summer, and are available for the
CBM64/128/Amiga, AtariXT/XL/ST, Amstrad CPC and Apple.
  The latest, _Hollywood_ _Hijinx,_ was scheduled for February
release. Written by Dave Anderson it is a kind of spoof about the good
old Hollywood 'B' movies. Set inside an old-style Malibu movie
producer's home, your task is to find 10 treasures a la Zork. Only
then can you inherit this vast estate. The catch is you must find all
the treasures in one night or lose everything.
  To add to the fun the character you control is a special effects
creature from a Buddy Burbank sci-fi film. The package contains a
gossip-filled Tinselworld magazine, an autographed photo of your Uncle
Buddy, a letter from Aunt Hildegarde and a lucky palm tree swizzle
stick. It sounds like just the thing to occupy a few pleasant hours.


Your Computer, May 1987

ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND

PROFILE: INFOCOM'S DAVE LEBLING

Mike Gerrard meets Dave Lebling, an Infocom founding father, and they
talk about grues, llamas, leather goddesses, Douglas Adams and Uncle
Buddy.

  When your editor phones you and asks if you'd like to meet someone
from Infocom, what do you do? That's right: DROP EVERYTHING. I was out
of the front door in a flash. Returning only to retrieve my trousers
and pick up a tape recorder, I made my way more sedately to the
palatial Hampstead offices of Activision, the company responsible for
bringing Infocom to an even wider audience in Britain since they took
over responsibility for the range last year. Having discovered that
the 'someone from Infocom' was Dave Lebling, the man responsible for
inflicting the grue on innocent adventurers everywhere, I considered
the possibility of extracting revenge but decided I'd forgive him if
he told me where the idea for the revolting creature came from in the
first place.
  "Yes, I must admit I invented the grues," he said. "The word comes
from a creature in a series of stories by a fellow named Jack Vance,
who to my mind is one of the best fantasy writers around and grues
come from a series of stories about a far future of the earth when the
sun is about to go out and magic has revived and there are strange
creatures all over, and one of them is the grue. Now the grue that he
invented is nothing like the grue in _Zork,_ but the name is so nice,
evoking, as it does, buckets of blood and things like that, that I
sort of stole it from him."

Horse

  And they kept on breeding, I pointed out.
  "Oh yes ... other than eating adventurers, that's all they do. There
was a period when there was a grue in every game. Even in _Suspect,_
the murder mystery I wrote, there was a horse named Lurking Grue, but
we've abandoned the idea as being a little bit ... well, previous."
  Moving from the history of the grue to the history of Infocom, that
was dealt with in some depth in a previous issue of _Your_ _Computer,_
and took us as far as the commercial release of _Zork_ _I,_ though
that wasn't quite the instant success you might expect with hindsight.
  "_Zork_ started slowly," Dave explained. "We were originally
distributed by Visicorp, which is the company that also distributed
_VisiCalc,_ the first spreadsheet program, and they sort of had the
feeling that, well, this is a very nice game but games were not very
exciting at the time, but we've got this spreadsheet program which is
really exciting, and I think that's how they looked at things. So
_Zork_ started off with what games sold then in the United States when
they were introduced, about ten or twelve thousand copies, and that
was pretty much what they expected so they weren't terribly interested
in pushing it harder so we got the distribution rights back from them
and started distributing it ourselves. We repackaged it and because it
was our own product we were very motivated to make it a success and it
began to pick up from that time. It had got spectacularly good reviews
but they weren't always translated into sales, but as time went on we
got it onto different machines, and that helped.
  "Also, all people had seen then were the Scott Adams adventures and
_Colossal Cave,_ and _Zork_ was bigger, more complicated, more
realistic, had a better parser ... from a grubby marketing point of
view there were a lot of good sales points, and then we came out with
_Zork_ _II,_ which helped even more, and of course, we've been turning
'em out ever since."
  They have turned out so many in the last twelve months, in fact,
that players in the UK may have found it quite a strain on their
wallets, despite the lower pricing now in evidence. We have seen
_Wishbringer,_ _A_ _Mind_ _Forever_ _Voyaging,_ _Moonmist,_
_Ballyhoo,_ _Leather_ _Goddesses_ _of_ _Phobos_ and now _Hollywood_
_Hijinx,_ followed by the eagerly awaited Douglas Adams game,
_Bureaucracy._ Eight games in a year?

Bizarre

  "Well the reason for that is partly because we've been getting
better distribution over here. _Wishbringer_ and _A_ _Mind_ _Forever_
_Voyaging_ came out in '85 in the States, the others in '86, and
_Bureaucracy_ is the first of our '87 titles. We tend to put out
between four and six games a year, and sometimes it takes them a
little longer to get over here for reasons which are usually totally
bizarre. We're getting them faster over here than we used to, and that
is partly because of Activision, and I think one of the reasons is
that the older ones that were coming through slowly pushed up against
the newer ones that were coming more quickly."
  I had wondered if what had seemed like an increased production rate
might cause problems in the debugging and checking of Infocom games,
as the latest release, _Hollywood_ _Hijinx,_ sports one or two
spelling and other mistakes, not normally associated with Infocom
products.
  "We do check them very carefully, but part of the reason for the
spelling mistakes ... I'll tell you this and then you can decide for
yourself whether you want to print it or not ... is that the author,
Dave Anderson, is a _terrible_ speller. The fact that you've only
found two so far is staggering! He's very funny and a very clever guy,
but he is not the world's greatest speller. The games do spend many
months in testing, both internally at Infocom and with outside
testers, and then about a month before the game's ready to be finished
someone, and it's often John Palace who is the manager of the
Interactive Fiction group and is an ex-editor, reads through the games
and looks for spelling mistakes.
  "In fact the two in _Hijinx,_ 'renowned' and 'maroading', somebody
encountered just the other day before I left. Lately we've been
running these marathons where we get teams of students together and
they play a game till they finish it. They're very good and tend to
start at six o'clock on a Friday evening and they'll play as long as
24 hours. Sometimes they bring tents and sleeping bags, and one of the
recent marathons was on _Hollywood_ _Hijinx_ and someone noticed the
mistakes there.
  "Spelling mistakes are actually pretty rare, but almost every game
we've ever produced, we've discovered after the release that there is
at least one fatal bug in it. Some of them are enormously obscure, and
the average player will never find one, but they creep in and of
course we always correct them next time the disks are ordered. We've
now gone through five, six, possibly seven releases of _Zork_
including two major renovations. In the most recent one, for example,
I upgraded its parser to our current standards of quality, and that's
for _The_ _Zork_ _Trilogy_ package."

Compression

  I asked Dave if the ever-expanding memories of home micros meant
there was less need to put effort into finding ways of compressing
text, and instead they could concentrate on improving the parser.
  "Oh no, we're always looking at things. Actually, compressing the
text and improving the parser work oppositely. Improving the parser
invariably means you make the game bigger so you have to compress the
text further. Even the bigger games we end up trying to compress, like
_Trinity,_ _Bureaucracy_ and _A_ _Mind_ _Forever_ _Voyaging._ Now we
have this larger system that will go up to 256K, and of those three
titles, two used all 256K, and with the third one only time prevented
it from doing it since it was growing like a yeast.
  "We have a program that goes through looking for frequent words and
compresses the most frequent into a single character. Another program
goes through looking for frequent phrases, like "Only an idiot would
try to...", and the program ranks them according to how much space
combining every instance of each phrase would save. I think we spend
far too much time trying to make characters work better."
  But is there such a thing as the ultimate parser?
  "Well, we, talking now, are the ultimate parser, but in computer
terms I think to parse as well as humans, a computer would have to be
truly artificially intelligent. However, to parse much better than
existing parsers parse, I don't think a computer would have to be that
much more clever than it is now. We're working on better parsers. I
know Magnetic Scrolls, who I went to see today in fact, are working on
better parsers. There are lots of people looking at ways of making
games more realistic in that way: better parsers, better characters,
better thieves, better trolls and things like that. We have a good
friendly rivalry going with Anita Sinclair and Magnetic Scrolls. We'll
make helpful comments like: 'You call that a parser? It's nothing but
a stinking heap of ...' But _The_ _Pawn_ is the most Infocom-like game
I've seen, and they do very nice stuff."
  It's not just the quality of Infocom's adventures that sets them
apart from any of their rivals, though, but also the packaging that
comes with them. Who could resist the Scratch 'n Sniff card from
_Leather_ _Goddesses,_ the genuine piece of pocket fluff in
_Hitchhiker's,_ or the signed photo of Uncle Buddy in _Hollywood_
_Hijinx,_ the movie director responsible for such classics as
_Vampire_ _Penguins?_

Nickname

  "The story behind Uncle Buddy is funny," says Dave. "The game was
written by Dave Anderson, whose nickname really is Hollywood, and he
went with the guy who designs our packaging to this stock photo shop,
a place where they have thousands of photos that you can use without
worrying about copyright, and they sifted through hundreds of these
photos and they could not find anyone who looked appropriate for the
character of Uncle Buddy. So when they got back to Infocom, Hollywood
said: 'Now I don't want to insult the guy, but the guy who runs the
photo store, _that_ is Uncle Buddy.' So we went back and approached
him and he thought it was wonderful. We decked him out even more
garishly than he would normally be decked out, took the photo ... and
the answer to what must be your unspoken question, that is truly the
man's real hair, it's not a toupee!"

Transcripts

  Had elaborate packaging been one of Infocom's ideas from the start?
  "Well the first packaging of _Zork_ was just the disk and the
manual, very prosaic, and the first one that had really exciting
packaging was _Deadline,_ the first murder mystery we did. We had seen
some things by Dennis Wheatley, I don't know what sort of books you'd
call them, but they had clues, transcripts, all kinds of fun stuff in
them, and I think it was Marc Blank seeing those things that motivated
him to write _Deadline_ and so we got the idea that it would be fun to
have interesting stuff in our packaging too. It was such a success,
and partly for that reason as well as being a good game, that the next
time we did a game we thought, well, we can put some other keen stuff
in it, and so we've just made a habit of it.
  "Sometimes, also, it incorporates anti-piracy elements, things like
the wheel in _Sorceror_ that is hard to reproduce. The little details
add to our fun, too, we spend a lot of time sitting round saying 'What
should we do?' We had enormous fun coming up with the gossip paper in
_Hollywood_ _Hijinx,_ it's totally bizarre. Actually our own criticism
of it was that it wasn't outrageous enough, it wasn't that much more
bizarre than a real gossip paper."
  The only Infocom game so far that has been an adaption from another
medium has been _The_ _Hitchhiker's_ _Guide_ _to_ _the_ _Galaxy._ I
wondered if this was the start of a trend or whether Infocom games
would always be original adventures.

Milliseconds

  "The major requirement we have on outside corraboration is not just
'Can we buy a licence to do it,' but rather in the way we did
_Hitchhiker's:_ is the author someone who's interested enough in the
medium to want to work with us directly? We don't like to go off and
buy some property just so we can slap that name on the package, we
much prefer to have the outside person say, as Douglas did: 'This is a
very interesting medium and I'd like to try to do something with it.'
Then we usually mull it over, and in the case of _Hitchhiker's_ I
think we mulled it over for about three milliseconds.
  "As for any books we might do in the future, I have to give our
stock answer to that which is that we don't publicise products more
than about six weeks before they're released. But having said that,
the obvious next thing would be _The_ _Restaurant_ _at_ _the_ _End_
_of_ _the_ _Universe,_ and there's always the possibility that that
might happen. I had dinner with Douglas last night, in fact, and we
talked about lots of things, including his new novel, of which he
alleges to have just actually finished correcting the galley proofs
yesterday, and he was at last free of it. He looked a tad haggard."

Paranoid

  As it's close to the release of _Bureaucracy,_ however, perhaps Dave
can tell me what that's about instead.
  "What's in _Bureaucracy?_ What _isn't_ in it? It's got the Zalagasan
National Airline, it's got Rambo-like paranoid schizophrenics, it's
got your bank, it's got Ronald Reagan and Mr Gorbachev, it's got
llamas, it's got the Boysanberry Computer, it's got the Zalagasa
User's Group on the Boysanberry Computer ... it's a very very strange
game and is hard to describe, much harder than _Hitchhiker's_ and
imagine trying to describe that. With that game you could say: 'Well,
it's sort of like the book, except different.' With _Bureaucracy_ you
could say: 'Well, it's sort of like the book of _Bureaucracy_ except
different and there isn't a book in the first place.'

Shambles

  "it starts when you move to take a new job, and you send a
change-of-address card to your bank, which promptly does what banks
always do with that sort of thing, which is to throw it away, and as a
result your entire life begins to collapse into a shambles of total
uselessness and you basically have to acquire the means to extricate
yourself from this situation of having no money, your mail going to
the wrong address, your credit cards cancelled, your computer not
working, all the kinds of terrific things that can happen. One of the
people who tested it, who was fortunately in the minority, didn't like
it very much and said 'I have enough of this happening at work, I
don't want to go home and have it happening on a micro too!' But it's
got everything, including the secret headquarters of the conspiracy
that masterminds the whole thing ... I'm not sure grues actually made
it, though in fact grues are instrumental in the conspiracies against
all of us."
  As if eating adventurers wasn't bad enough! Dave Lebling, what have
you done?