1985: Making TEXT ADVENTURE Games | Micro Live | Retro Gaming | BBC Archive

Fred Harris goes behind the scenes at Boston software company Infocom. The developer has enjoyed great success with its line of text adventure games - the likes of Zork, Planetfall, Enchanter, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - which eschew graphics in favour of a simple text display, and arcade gameplay in favour of what the company calls 'interactive fiction'.
Game designer Dave Liebling - one of Infocom's founder members - is currently putting the finishing touches to a new game called Spellbreaker. He explains the processes that go in to making a good text-adventure game.
This clip is from Micro Live, originally broadcast 29 November, 1985.
You can play the 30th Anniversary edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Game here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...
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[@crimsontadpoles]

Interesting seeing how much programming has changed since 1985. That part where he's looking at the code, trying to figure out the bug, and thinking it ought to work, is rather relatable.

[@JulianQuinn]

Extremely relatable 😂

[@lordsmeagol3390]

That code is NASTY to read! I can understand why there were so many bugs during development and testing, as evidenced by the bug report shown later! That fat (before-shipping) bug report would DWARFED by the (after-shipping) Microsoft Windows bug reports! I disassembled the CP/M Infocom Interpreter in 1985 and assembled a custom optimized Tatung Einstein version. Then I did something CRAZY - porting the interpreter to BBCBASIC for CP/M so I could analyze and decompile the game data file! Not knowing C back then made my generic decompilation or ZORK1.DAT look a lot like structured BASIC. Looking back on it when I knew C, the decompilation would work better in C-style. There is no need for me to update my decompiler to output C-style source as I have found some Infocom source code on GitHub / historicalsource. A source-level converter may be worth someone writing to convert that ZIL source to C++.

[@arilebon]

This was filmed 1 year prior to Infocom's purchase by Activision; and 6-7 years before Infocom's demise an an entity. Time moves fast in the software industry.

[@MTCason]

The Zork games still rank among the best and most innovative of all time. Wonderful to see this!

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

0:21 That is Brian Moriarty who lifts up the can of soda! He went on to be instrumental to Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts! He did a tremendously great presentation at GDC 2015 on how he and his team made "Loom," and that presentation is on KZbin!

[@panqueque445]

"Why is it not terminating? It really ought to work" I see programming hasn't changed a bit.

[@NorthernerInSpace]

Really enjoyed these games back in the day. Zork was ported to so many platforms, we even figured out how to get it to run on the University mainframe. That reduced our productivity somewhat!

[@ginabattz9716]

My dad got it from his university!!

[@edix1673]

I remember very early text based games from my early childhood, an indiana jones game springing to mind.... are you aware of any emulators for these style games? Id love to have a text based pc games night...!

[@NorthernerInSpace]

@@edix1673 you just need to do a search. Unfortunately if I try and post a link it gets taken down! They are out there.

[@kwc1138]

In early 80s our team stayed late and wrote a complete football manager/simulation program in text only ... being a small mainframe. Later, one work colleague even had his own C64 portable that he brought into office, played staying late in office and then hit the London pubs before getting the last train home.

[@DreamyAbaddon]

@@edix1673 I use DosBox emulator for MSDOS to run these games on a Windows 11 machine.

[@Xoferif]

The lady that enthusiastically presents the bug to Dave Lebling is Amy Briggs, who went on to write Plundered Hearts. 😄

[@SprocketWalker]

This old video footage is a real treasure! Thank you for posting it.

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

When playing computer games stopped requiring note-taking on paper, some of the magic was lost forever.

[@DasTubemeister]

Back when games came in 4K . Memory, not resolution.

[@precumming]

Back in my day memory was stored accoustically and if you needed to store more you'd just have a longer wire

[@AlanCanon2222]

174K was the maximum capacity of a Commodore 64 1541 drive, so each game's complete code and database fit in that space. I can't remember how much RAM was used as the interpreter ran (loading room descriptions from the disc at key points), but 4K might not be far off the mark (the Commodore 64 had much more RAM than that, but I'm sure Infocom games ran on far more limited systems with perhaps only 16K total).

[@indetermite]

@@precumming Wait, I've seen you before somewhere...

[@precumming]

@@indetermite Maybe the trainspotting video? I have posted quite a few comments across BBC Archive videos but sadly the trainspotting comment is as good as it gets

[@indetermite]

@@precumming Nah, it was that filibuster on a video about Minecraft's new chat reporting system.

[@georgebailey98]

I still have The Lost Treasures Of Infocom compilation on the Amiga, which includes twenty Infocom adventures.

[@LeighamShardlow]

My god that moon logic for that puzzle at the end. Who in thier right mind would think to animate something THEN make it yawn as the only solution.

[@potatoface4698]

Only a PhD from MIT 😅

[@alexanderfreeman]

I haven't played Spellbreaker, but it's possible the game provides you with enough information to solve it. Sometimes logical puzzles sound illogical when taken out of context.

[@Dr.Quarex]

I was thinking while watching that what a bad idea it was to collect a dozen brilliant minds together to come up with an insane puzzle and solution, at least if you want the average player to be able to figure it out

[@LeighamShardlow]

The problem is that you would really have to point people in that direction. Short of spelling it out, thus defeating the object of it being a puzzle I can't think of how you would push that solution.

[@WhoisTheOtherVindAzz]

Assuming that there are many other otherwise inanimate objects to animate in the game then seeing as this was a rather peculiar object assuming that players would be attempting to animate it doesn't seem that far fetched; even without hints (just assuming that your average player has some imagination; which someone playing a text based adventure at that time hopefully did). Getting it to jawn could be hinted at in multiple ways.

[@SnoopyDoofie]

Imagine going back in time and showing this programmer a modern day hi-def video game. He'd be blown out of his mind.

[@SierraSierraFoxtrot]

Even just a 10 year leap from 195 to 1995 would have blown people's minds.

[@hardcoded]

I saw a magazine ad by them at that time and it said the human brain was "The Ultimate Graphics Interface" so it's not like they didn't have that kind of competition going on back then.

[@cmck1777]

He’d be shocked at the poor writing. Unless you showed him Disco Elysium.

[@SierraSierraFoxtrot]

@@cmck1777 oof you're not wrong.

[@davidioanhedges]

Thier reaction would be for most games, amazing graphics, but where is the story...

[@digitaldobbie]

The meeting at the beginning of the video seemed like a bunch of men with an excuse to have a mid-day feast of pastrami and olives

[@c1v1lwar24]

>You are in a room. A wizard sits at a desk reading an arcane parchment. To the north is a mysterious door with a heavy lock. What will you do? >You have selected QUIT.

[@emjackson2289]

Sounds like Lee Carvallos Putting Challenge

[@Asrashas]

Kill Jester

[@c1v1lwar24]

@@Asrashas 😄

[@cryptojonny6837]

>You have selected the CHEAT CODE ROOM please enter pass.

[@3DJapan]

In the early 90s I got a 1982 IBM XT from an auction. I didn't have any software for it until I was walking down the street and found a big box of floppy disks someone left by the curb. They had gotten wet from rain and snow so I dried them and many were damaged but among the working ones was Zork, Hitchhiker's Guides to the Galaxy, and Leisure Suit Larry. I had a ton of fun with those.

[@videogamebookreviews]

I played a lot of these games at the time. But now that I'm older I don't think I could tolerate the trinity of bad features that came with many of them: Lunar logic (AKA moon logic) Sudden and unavoidable death Soft-locking (AKA unwinnable situations). The third one was not so common - sometimes it was simply the case that you had got lost and didn't know where to go - but a web search nowadays will name guilty games. Still, some good times.

[@VirtualVikki]

I remember spending a ton of money for a memory upgrade as you had to have 24k of RAM to run Infocom games and the Atari 800 only came with less than that to start. I had a blast playtesting games for them shortly after this video was shot. It is odd that they have no posters up on the walls. They had a nice poster for Wishbringer at this point. What a blast this video was to watch!

[@michaelbrownlee9497]

There was a star trek game like this I use too play on a Tandy laptop. Back then I had a very developed imagination from reading novels for entertainment. It was pretty cool, because your kind of in a trance when reading. Use too enjoy the radio story shows too. People really freaked right out during the war of the worlds broadcast.

[@jaymac7203]

I love this channel so much! Lol the nostalgia from these old fascinating videos is amazing 👏 I wish this was a longer video 😭

[@jonathancauldwell9822]

For a laugh I had a go at hand-coding a text adventure for the 16K Spectrum and ZX81 last year so I can understand the section about how simple they are to port; essentially just a different set of IO routines. Obviously it's a bit more involved if you're changing the CPU but the core game remains the same

[@richcollins4208]

Programming is about being extremely detailed at everything and have a 3rd person perspective of what your doing

[@3DJapan]

I loved their Hitchihiker's Guide game.

[@HowardChegwyn]

Me. My Spectrum 48k, and a tape recorder from Woolworths. 🔥

[@CABJ007]

Aaahh those were the days!!

[@HowardChegwyn]

@@CABJ007 True story. 🔥

[@CABJ007]

@@HowardChegwyn 👍

[@AtheistOrphan]

‘That’s the wonder of Woolies’

[@HowardChegwyn]

Thanks guys for being polite. You're all awesome. Have an amazing day!

[@AlanCanon2222]

These games were incredibly imaginative and fun to play. I know I spent hundreds of hours playing them on the Commodore 64, Apple ][, and TRS-80. The competitors that used primitive graphics (Sierra Online (Ken and Roberta Williams), Scott Adams) just weren't anywhere near as classy as the pure text games from Infocom. The later ones had more sophisticated parsers that could understand prepositional phrases ("put coin in green slot"), not just VERB NOUN sentences. The illusion of interacting with a live storyteller was strong, in part because of the rich descriptions, and how the programmers seemed to have thought of every off-the-wall thing you might conceivably try. Some games, like Planetfall, contained truly emotionally moving scenes, while almost all of the games had a wry tongue-in-cheek humor to go with the story.

[@davedogge2280]

I worked with a few of the guys in the 90s who were the English equivalent of these guys, they worked for Magnetic Scrolls and did adventure games like The Pawn. To those here in the comments who say, it's nerd talk and boring etc. they're talking about parsers i.e. code that allows a machine to syntactically validate a text based adventure game type language grammar, the code used to run all the apps on the device you use to watch this very same video is checked by a parser and then later compiled into macine code to actually run, parsers can be defined using BNF and EBNF notation. Learn to code !!

[@garryleeks4848]

So borrrrrrrrring

[@davedogge2280]

@@garryleeks4848 That's right. You have to actively engage your brain in order to not be bored.

[@garryleeks4848]

@@davedogge2280 They were probably been paid a fortune to be boring

[@davedogge2280]

@@garryleeks4848 No, I believe bug testers and programmers back in that day only got paid what your average office job paid. It's those who owned the company who got the $ when the company was profitable. Now that's what I call .. boring.

[@garryleeks4848]

@@davedogge2280 very boring mate 👍

[@rudiklein]

You gotta love the DEC VT100 terminal.

[@alho9231]

I remember Micro Live on the Beeb! Thanks for sharing this 👍👍👍 Infocom were so ahead of their time writing on one system and just porting their games to other computers like running an emulator

[@springheeledjack81]

Meat platter & softdrink. Perfect

[@thebadgamer1967]

Awesome, love this time capsules

[@AtheistOrphan]

I hope they remembered to complete their TPS report cover sheets.

[@ginabattz9716]

“Yeaaahhhhhh….”

[@circattle]

Hahaha. I was thinking at the start of the film, their office had some Severance vibes too.

[@CoconutPete]

As a kid I always wondered what the Infocom headquarters looked like... these guys were geniuses.. way ahead of their time

[@randomscandinavian6094]

A great lost artform, the text adventure. Where the graphics are formed in your mind and not in a huge GPU with a cooling system. Watching I figured I must have played at least one of their games and looked them up and it turns out I don’t think I have played a single one, which is a great shame.

[@davidioanhedges]

It's not lost... IF is still alive...

[@AaronAnaya]

A lot of primarily text based RPGs are hugely popular in the indie game scene. The spirit of this stuff is alive in modern games like Citizen Sleeper and Disco Elysium.

[@ChristianSasso]

Never saw this before, and it is very interesting to see how the original "implementors" used to work: they seem to form a pretty happy bunch.

[@Tabletop_Epics]

Infocom was an excellent company which really hit upon one of the best, though too often dismissed, forms of computer gaming. They created novels coupled with physical experiences ("Feelies") which came to life and played with, excited, and challenged the end user. Interactive Fiction, in its traditional form but with the advantages of advancing technology, truly is one of the best things for which one can use a computer.

[@RJ3040]

Wishbringer was written because they wanted to see if they could get away with marketing a rock.

[@dennis9ustafsson]

Thank you for sharing

[@maineiacial]

Ha! I worked at Alewife Park Place at Infocom during this time. Customer service brat with access to every computer you could think of. Shift ended at 5 wnd i would go play Arcticfox til 11 then take the train home

[@ResoluteGryphon]

When he said you couldn't reach the cube in the idol's mouth, I immediately thought, "What if you could bring the idol to life and make it yawn?" I hope the rest of the puzzles aren't so obvious!

[@cmck1777]

I love this so much

[@hasfidanken]

Who the hell put a thumbs down on this video!?? Must be a grue.

[@grueslayer]

Obviously, Zork has been a major influence my entire life... just look at my name. I really do miss Infocom and wish Microsoft who bought Activision after buying Infocom would bring back new text only Zork or Planetfall adventures.

[@AlanCanon2222]

"Play paddleball with Floyd?"

[@MicrobyteAlan]

We played these on VAX 11/780s back in the day

[@anthonybradley1555]

the infamous babel fish puzzle, i still get nightmares over that today lol jk🤣but still getting into an unwinnable state really was frustrating 🤬

[@hiker64]

Favorite after Zork was "Nord and Bert couldn't make head or tails of it."

[@maineiacial]

You all should check out Frontalots great 80s nerd song 'Its Pitch Dark'(you are likely to be eaten by a grue)

[@timothystark4475]

Yeah. They wrote ZIL programs on PDP-10 systems.

[@cosine.]

Bandersnatch vibes 👀

[@ltipst2962]

Had to save this to watch later you just know I need to see this

[@emjackson2289]

In the Itchy and Scratchy Text Adventure Game, is there a way to get out of the dungeon without using the Wizard Key?!

[@Braincain007]

Lmao I remember this episode

[@junosix2453]

5:01 Atari ST!

[@Mr.1.i]

Adventure games are easy to make it just needs a bit of good planning but programming the game in what was most probably used is microsoft basic would be an easy task for a person starting to learn programming moving sprites upon background bit maps well thats another level that usually employs cpu assembly which is like putting sums in a calulator in reverse

[@svo913]

Turns out that a bunch of MIT grads weren't the right group to anticipate that the average person actually just wanted pictures so they didn't have to use their imaginations! Thank you, Roberta Williams. :)

[@gloversasby1898]

I still like text rpgs and wish people would sell them on xbox and playstation to keep the art around.

[@xsm5525]

woo!! Amiga got a mention! :)

[@chriswalker3375]

Something not trash from the BBC

[@AtheistOrphan]

I initially thought that was an Apple Lisa in the thumbnail.

[@Bertie_Ahern]

When I first invented the computer, I didn't expect it to end up like this!

[@stevena488]

Growing older and having grown up with those "logic puzzles", I've come to realise these games were made by dudes who wanted revenge against their fellow man. Like it's PURE malice. This was their therapy in the 80s

[@Laura-sg6ss]

Gaminnnngg. Nerds... but also gaminggg💃🏽😏

[@davidpanton3192]

I wonder if they had more customers than staff? Those were the days when the CEO of a tech company wore a tie.

[@maineiacial]

Yes. They had 1000 times

[@AlanCanon2222]

They were really popular, their games sold all over the United States in game stores, computer stores, and mass market retail bookstores. The floppy disks were easily pirated, so the packaging typically had (as stated) little "feelies", physical items that were in some cases essential to solving the game (a star map, say), but cool keepsakes in any case (a glow in the dark magic stone from Wishbringer). They discouraged piracy. Also, the games weren't very expensive, eventually retailing for around $15 apiece. So even if you had pirated a copy of an Infocom game and solved it, it would be fun to buy the packaged game when you had a chance, just because the boxes and their contents were just as imaginative as the games themselves.

[@nicholascampbell3259]

@@AlanCanon2222 I'm not American so I can't speak about the US market, but in the UK, Infocom's adventures *were* expensive compared to other games. That may be partly due to the cost of importing them from the US. I think a typical Infocom adventure for an 8-bit computer like the Commodore 64 cost £25 in the mid-1980s, when most other disk-based games were selling for £15, and even other 'high-end' text adventures from the likes of Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls cost £20 - and most 8-bit machines in the UK were cassette-based, so owners of these machines couldn't play Infocom adventures anyway. In hindsight, £25 seems really cheap when you look at how much Infocom's games sell for on eBay nowadays!

[@WreckItRolfe]

I have only played Zork, though I didn't get far.

[@hiker64]

You're supposed to open the mailbox :)

[@eeezeeindian]

Seems like a black mirror episode

[@TheStevenWhiting]

MetalJesus loves their games.

[@davedogge2280]

Does Zork run at 60 fps ?

[@buzzoff619]

I tried a game like this but was off to such a bad start I quit right away, then I started questioning my own brain. You see, I typed to go east I think. Then after going east I typed go west, and I did. It wasn’t until I was back where I started that I realised west is opposite of east. Basically to me this was an IQ test for babies and I failed.

[@maxwellmogadam399]

mmm bandersnatch

[@thisisreallyme3130]

While the genre was shrinking, Activision really did mess things up. It makes no sense to allow all these takeovers when you know the parent company doesn't understand what they are buying (if they did, they would have been players in the space).

[@MiataBRG]

I remember text adventure games, they were always incredibly disappointing to a 13/14 Yr old who was excited by the graphics on the box

[@TesterAnimal1]

Old VT100 being used there. Memories… of 24 by 80 character screens and 16k max process memory!

[@ondinnonk]

>snavig grouper

[@mr.k3329]

Ahhh but there is one game which survived the test of time and did not succumb to the fate of all those which came before it. A game known as Gemstone IV. The current and longest lasting game of it's kind. Over 40 years in age.

[@jamesbyrne9312]

Joel berez, Jeff bezoz.lol

[@EmlynBoyle]

I loved playing this games back in the day...when you had to use your imagination (and probably improve your grammar/typing skills!).

[@AtheistOrphan]

NERRRRRDDDSSS!!!

[@emjackson2289]

You are Homer Simpson and I claim my five pounds

[@AtheistOrphan]

@@emjackson2289 - Cheque or Postal Order?

[@tirmyta]

PLUGH

[@CricketEngland]

If they are finding that many bugs in his work then he is obviously not doing his job properly

[@user-ht1jg4qz3h]

and here i am in 2024 thinking 'interactive fiction' was a new "word" or concept barely 5 years old...🤦🏻‍♂️🤷🏼‍♀️🙍‍♀️

[@grahammcdonald]

I wanna be big.

[@1neinate0]

The guy making the game doesn’t know how to beat the game he made ? Is the machine learning as it goes and making its own game ?

[@TinLeadHammer]

Disposable plates and utensils - hateful stuff.

[@jamesbyrne9312]

Isn't it mad that all these whizz kids are now pensioners

[@garryleeks4848]

Haven’t got a clue what they are on about, nerd talk, boring.

[@greyarea6688]

You haven't got a clue what they're on about or they haven't got a clue what they're on about? Sorry, I didn't understand which it was.

[@garryleeks4848]

@@greyarea6688 I haven’t 😂

[@spearPYN]

Zork is the original computer Dungeons & Dragons. All CRPG games descend from it. The next revolutionary game was Dungeon Master in 1987.

[@greyarea6688]

Anyone have any idea if these games are either preserved or available to play anywhere online? It doesn't surprise me that in terms of abandonware there a likely large swathes of culturally and historically important titles that have either fallen into obscurity or, sadly, may have vanished altogether.

[@oblongcassidy]

Yep, there are places to play online, and it's even on Steam which is weirdly funny to me

[@octaviussludberry9016]

1:14 Don't do drugs kids.

[@Goettel]

< 3 Infocom

[@AliensKillDevils.]

Enjoy Sunshine and Please be Vegan, no animal’s eggs, animal’s milk, animal’s cheese, animal’s butter, and insect’s honey. Return to the original owner 1 by 1: return every animal and insect 1 by 1, every bite of meat, every drop of blood, every drop of soup, every bone, every bone marrow, and every skin. I’m sorry. Thank you.🥬🥗🌽🥕🥦🥥🥑🍓🍇🍌🍎🍐🍑🥭🍅🥒🍉❤️🌞🌈👼❤️🏖.