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Interviews
Just Adventure Interview with Howard Sherman – Malinche Entertainment
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JA – Some people claim that there’s no hope for the adventure genre, let alone for interactive fiction. As and independent developer, what would you say if confronted with these arguments?
No, no and NO! <grin> Just yesterday a co-worker’s wife popped into the office to drop off some paperwork and asked me what I was doing as she took a peek at my screen. I explained I was programming a new text adventure game called Greystone. She asked me “what’s that?” and I quickly explained and demonstrated. She walked out with a marketing agreement to help me sell IF to the K-12 education market here in the United States. She couldn’t believe the power of IF and how it could transform students with a bored-at-best attitude towards reading. She never heard of IF before and she walked out wide-eyed and wondrous at the very prospect of INTERACTING with a story. How many other people like her walk the earth I wonder….?
That’s to speak nothing of the staunch IF fan. The Zork trilogy sold over one million copies in its heyday roughly twenty years ago. That was an incomprehensible achievement in the 1980s and remains a very impressive milestone today. All of those fans are out there and we’re reaching out to them.
JA – Let’s talk now about Pentari: First Light (PFL). On Malinche’s web site you acknowledge that the game is in the line of the classic Infocom’s games. In which points Pentari is in debt with games such as Zork or Spellbreaker? On the other hand, which innovations has Pentari added to the genre?
As a genre, I stand on the shoulders of the Infocom Implementors that forged the path that I am honoured to follow. PFL contains humor in a similar vein to what you’d find in an Infocom title with cute responses and snappy comebacks to silly things the adventurer may try. At the same time, the writing has received excellent reviews as being excellent in its own right, another hallmark of Infocom. And just as Infocom never stood still with regard to their technology, neither has Malinche. Thanks to modern computers, PFL is larger than Zork 1, Zork 2 and Zork 3 combined while simultaneously adding commands and features that didn’t exist in Infocom’s day. Such commands as LOOK NORTH (which gives you a room description of the area north of you) or EXITS which quickly and succinctly tells you all the possible exits out of the room you’re currently in.
Back to the capacity of modern computers, nearly every item appearing in PFL is ornately described in detail. In nearly every Infocom game the computer capacity just wasn’t there to elaborate on anything but the most important items in a game. Take Zork Zero for example. It’s an excellent game by anyone’s standards and one of the largest ever produced by Infocom. Even so, object descriptions were virtually non-existent. Go to the throne room and examine the sceptre of Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excesssive and all you get is “There is nothing noteworthy about the sceptre.” Of course we all know that can’t be true. Stephen King, when advising aspiring authors, always urges you to tell the truth. That may seem paradoxical when talking about fiction but it really isn’t if you think about it. In truth, the sceptre IS noteworthy and should be described accordingly. I don’t fault Infocom for this even one bit; they made the most of what they had at the time. Computers of that time just couldn’t support the kind of Interactive Fiction that is being written today by Malinche. Heck, I had to “thin down” PFL to run on the PalmOS since even the Dragonball CPU at 33Mhz had a tough time struggling with the immensity of First Light.
JA – If someone who has never played IF before asked you about what does PFL has to offer for him/her, What would be your answer
I could borrow right from Malinche’s website in that regard. PFL reads like a novel but demands decisions be made by the reader. PFL offers the neophyte adventurer a rich, deeply woven story combined with the freedom of choice on the part of the “reader” with regard to where they will go, what they will do and who they will talk to and what they will say to those people. Reading a book is 90% passive and 10% active. Passively, you’re reading the story already laid out for you. Actively you’re wondering “whodunnit” or where the evil ogre may be hiding. With IF the ratio is roughly inverted. 90% of the time you’re actively contemplating your next move and 10% of the time you’re reading the prose that describes people, places and things.
