Striving for Gothic Chill, Not a Humorous Touch

Matt Newsome conducted the following interview with Cecilia Barajas, producer, and Laird Malamed, technical director, of Activision's Zork Nemesis.

XYZZYnews: Cecilia, Laird, thanks very much for agreeing to participate in this interview. Perhaps I could start by asking each of you to explain your role in relation to Zork:Nemesis and your current projects. Were you involved with the development of any other Infocom/Zork games?

Cecilia Barajas: I was the director/producer of Zork Nemesis. Before that, I was an associate producer on [the Mac version of] Return to Zork.

Laird Malamed: I was the technical director of Zork Nemesis. I was in charge of overseeing all of the programming as well as various other technical aspects of the game. I helped on design and production. I will be directing the next Zork game.

XYZZYnews: Did you play any of the original Infocom interactive fiction works prior to embarking on the new project? Were you a fan during the early days?

CB: Yes, I did. I am a big fan of the early Zorks.

LM: I first played C&W's Adventure on a mainframe at my Uncle's bank in 1978. I then played almost all of the early games from Infocom (Zork I-III, Deadline, Enchanter, Suspended, Planetfall, etc...) as well as others (does anyone remember Broderbund's Kabul Spy?) on my Apple II. When I started at Activision (January 1995), I replayed the first three Zork's. I also played Ballyhoo and Infidel on my Psion during my vacation over the summer.

XYZZYnews: Was that for research purposes or for pleasure?

CB: I played the games originally for pleasure. I replayed them later for both pleasure and research.

LM: More for pleasure. But I was looking for research as well.

XYZZYnews: Do you have a favorite Infocom game?

CB: Zork 1.

LM: My favorite game is Zork III. Funny, I really disliked it the first time I played it. I even wrote a letter to Infocom telling them why it wasn't so great. I got back a reply from Marc Blank telling me my spelling was horrible. I was 14. Playing it later in life, I really appreciate it. I also like Lurking Horror a lot as it takes place in a very MIT setting.

XYZZYnews: It's interesting to hear the name "Lurking Horror" come up because I, for one, feel that Nemesis has more in common with that work than Zork -- especially in terms of that "gothic chill" when you're playing it! There's also, of course, the Department of Alchemy in Lurking Horror and alchemy is essentially the core theme in Nemesis.

Despite the success of this horror approach, one element of Zork that I felt was missing in Nemesis was humor! You can't get very far through the original Zork without grinning at something -- whether it's the adventurer on the other side of the mirror, or being eaten by a grue, there's a fairly liberal injection of humorous comments throughout. Was this a deliberate move -- to make the game more immersive, for example?

CB: Yes. I must say initially I thought about moving in more humor, but felt concerned that this would break the spell of being in a serious environment and undermine any immersivity.

One of the great things about text is that it allows you to play with tone. A lot of the humor in the early Zorks was in the computer responses to your mistakes. In this way, the creators were able to preserve a mood of an environment but interject humor. They were also able to control the type of humor so that it would generally stay on the side of hip and ironic, instead of hokey and stupid. Since I was working in the world of graphics, I didn't have this tool. Ultimately, however, I wanted the game to immerse the player in a surreal, credible alternate universe and believed too much humor would detract from that experience.

LM: Well, there's lots of humor in Nemesis as well. The books have some of it. Others are in the live action pieces or the diaromas. The game does lack the pun based humor of Return to Zork, and may not be as overtly humorous as Zork I-III, but that was the nature of the story.

XYZZYnews: I noticed that, unlike the last Zork title, "Return to Zork", the originators of Zork were not credited or acknowledged in the documentation for this game. To what extent do you feel the new game owes a debt of gratitude to the original Infocom staff?

CB & LM: The fact that they were not credited was in no way meant to cast any disrespect on their influence and importance in the Zork series, if not the computer games business. To us, the Zork universe not only created a powerful world, its birth was a seminal moment in the history of all computer games. At the risk of sounding hokey, We not only believe Zork Nemesis owes these creators a debt of gratitude, but so do all computer (especially adventure) games.

XYZZYnews: So were the original Infocom staff consulted or asked to join development at any stage?

CB & LM: Not really.

XYZZYnews: Do you feel the new graphical medium lacks any elements which were present in the original text-only medium?

CB: I believe the most powerful medium is "the word." Graphical games are woefully lacking the power of the text adventure. Think about the power of words. In a text adventure, I can say things like, "You suddenly feel a shiver run through your spine. The stench of death is overpowering." Can I even come close to expressing this through graphics or sound? No way. The reality is that those of us working with graphics and sound, can only struggle to use these tools in a way that comes close to the power of words.

LM: Yeah, we can't be as subtle. Everything is more or less in the open for discovery immediately. This makes the wrong answer feedback harder to do. Also, the wrong answers typically require more art and sound, which is expensive. There is also the narrator's voice (or world's voice) that is missing from the way first-person games work which was part of the text tradition. However, the ability to present fully visual elements, like narrative scenes, cool animations and the such are tools that we gain.

XYZZYnews: So what do you personally feel was the project's greatest success?

CB: I think the game's biggest success was in creating an immersive, compelling world with a strong, non-linear story.

LM: The story is very real and complex. I think the game tells an interesting and intriguing tale that keeps people playing. I also am proud of the Z-vision engine, and its new navigation style. I think the freedom of movement offers a lot and allows us to show more of the environment while giving players freedom to explore as they wish.

XYZZYnews: What is your long-term vision of computer games in the adventure/interactive fiction genre?

CB & LM: If you are including graphical adventures in this question, our belief is that this genre will continue to be strong. We both like first-person, immersive adventure games so we hope these will continue to evolve as well.

XYZZYnews: Is any Zork related merchandise available?

CB & LM: Yes, we have a strategy guide currently available. There is also a new Infocom Masterpieces collection coming onto the market and we might do other products such as a CD or a calendar.

XYZZYnews: Interesting! What type of material might appear on the CD and calendar?

LM: Well, nothing is for certain, but the CD would contain the ambient music and maybe some of the live action cues. Both the CD and Calendar would have images from the game as well.

XYZZYnews: Was the game a commercial success?

CB & LM: Yes.

XYZZYnews: Is there going to be a follow up? If so, has any kind of time scale been suggested for the next game?

CB & LM: There will be a follow-up game although the schedule has not been solidified yet.

XYZZYnews: So, we can expect to see other games using the Z-Vision engine?

CB & LM: Yes you can -- but we dare not say more.

XYZZYnews: Fair enough! In terms of design, how did you go about devising the theme and puzzles? Was it a one man show, or did a whole team of designers contribute?

CB: Initially, I came up with a core feel and tone to the game. I then worked with a writer and designer to start evolving the story. As we expanded the story, we then started to create the "puzzle landscapes" and weave them into the story so that they would spring out of the narrative. This went on for a few months and we came up with an alpha design. That design went under massive revisions. I revised where I thought puzzles were weak -- working with people on my internal team. Revisions were a fairly informal process. I'd sit in my office with Laird or with Will Westwater and we'd discuss a puzzle its strength, weakness and then start hashing out possibilities. We devoted an extreme amount of attention to the puzzles, making sure they were fair and integrated. Before we went into production, we paper tested the design, and from this we made another set of revisions. Play balancing is something we did until the very end.

LM: Cecilia and Mark Long did the initial major design. Additional design was done by other members of the team.

XYZZYnews: As a computer science major, I'd be interested, as I'm sure others would, to hear what kind of systems you used to develop Nemesis -- did you use a standard language like C and develop the Z-Vision engine, or was it built up from assembler?

CB: Z-Vision was built using C++ for the core engine with bits of assembly thrown in for optimization. A scripting tool was created using Visual Basic for the puzzle and node based game logic.

LM: Z-Vision is written in C++ with some C code as well. The core engine is a small application that was compiled in Visual C++. The game itself is programmed with a language we created (DouglaScript), that is generated by a graphical Visual Basic world builder. All of the scripts are in text and are easily editable, although they are stored in a special way so we easily change syntax or add parameters. This allows for flexibility and a low memory footprint at runtime.

XYZZYnews: To what do you attribute the continued interest in text-based interactive fiction? Are you surprised that a small group continue to reject the latest offerings in favor of these?

CB: I think people are interested in text-based interactive fiction because it is a totally compelling interactive experience. I think one of the things that happened with the advent of "wow" graphics and sound, was that people quickly grabbed the eye candy, leaving some of the satisfying and meaty (but not so immediately glamourous) text adventures behind. More and more mass consumers came into the market at this time -- these people had never even heard of text adventures and were therefore less inclined to play them. One of the things I sincerely hope is that Zork Nemesis will encourage people to go back and play the early Zorks and help revitalize a genre that I believe will always be powerful.

LM: I am not terribly surprised. I still like playing the old games because they are so well written. Also, I like to read a lot, so they present two of my interests simultaneously -- gaming and reading. Further, because of TADs and Inform, etc., many people can create games for many platforms without lots of outlay of cash or resources.

XYZZYnews: Laird, you mentioned earlier that you're familiar not only with Psions (which lots of XYZZYnews readers use to play the games when commuting), but also with Inform and TADS. Have either of you ever written a text adventure with one of these toolkits or even your own systems?

LM: I have written some basic stuff with Inform, but only to experiment. I hope to get more into it over the summer. I have written small adventures back in the Apple II days.

XYZZYnews: Cecilia, you mentioned that you feel games using graphics and sound have a harder job creating a convincing game world than their purely textual counterparts. Were elements of Nemesis, such as the books lying around and the library, included to try to harness some of this power?

CB: Yes and no. I believe text adventures are a totally different genre -- the buzz of playing a text adventure is very different than the buzz of reading a book. So having a lot of books in the Nemesis world I wasn't trying to create the text adventure buzz, but I was trying to harness the power of the written word as a narrative device.

I could ramble on and on about the method of creating narrative in a graphical adventure game, but one of my approaches is to "seed" the world with packets of narrative where the player can discover potent bits of story. One of the ways I did this seeding in Nemesis was through video hallucinations, another was through the text passages. Text is great because you get a lot of narrative bang for your buck.

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