Inside Look at Game Development

Here at Infocom, we try to get as many people as possible involved in the game development process in order to create a smorgasbord of ideas. Our theory is that "too few cooks create a noisesome stew." In fact, we frequently even invite characters from the games to our development sessions. Here's a transcript made from a recording of one such session:

MARC BLANK: We need to start working on a new game.

DIMWIT FLATHEAD: It must have two hundred thousand rooms, four million takeable objects, and understand a vocabulary of every single word ever spoken in every language ever invented.

WIZARD OF FROBOZZ: Fantastic.

MONICA: Not on your life, flatbrain. Not with the crew of two-bit programmers we've got around this dump!

BLANK: I think we ought to analyze the situation.

SGT. DUFFY: With all due respect, sir, I don't think I can take the situation to the lab.

FROBOZZ: Fiddlesticks.

FLOYD: Enough talking! Let's play hider-and-seeker!

FLATHEAD: And it must be 600 thousand million billion megabytes and take up 37 truckloads of floppy disks...

BLANK: Maybe if we could start by settling on a genre.

GURTHARK-TUN-BESNAP: I don't know the word "genre."

BLANK: That is, fantasy, sci-fi, mystery...

MONICA: The only mystery around here is how you ever got to be VP, gnurd.

FLATHEAD: ...and the packages will be made of solid gold and platinum...

KRILL: I can't use multiple direct objects with the verb "made."

BLANK: Maybe we should schedule another meeting...

FROBOZZ: Friday.

Last revised: Fri Sep 15 13:07:55 EDT 1995 / Peter Scheyen <pete@csd.uwo.ca>