This is really cool. Jason Scott made a documentary called GET LAMP about the history of text adventures. Which is cool enough and I want to watch that thing. While making the film he met and interviewed people involved in the creation of those games, including Steve Meretzky. Steve worked at Infocom and it turns out he saved EVERYTHING. Jason scanned a lot of it for use in his documentary:
I scanned as much as I could, and after working on Steve’s “design binders”, which are very large combinations of every scrap of paper related to a game, I took a run at the file cabinet, which had pretty much every major communicated aspect of the Infocom company, from memorandums and business process through to interoffice softball game preparations and crab race outcomes. I definitely didn’t get everything, but I got a whole lot. Something on the order of roughly 9,000 scanned items, in fact.
And now he has put a lot of it up on the Internet Archive so everyone can check it out.
The collection is called The Infocom Cabinet, and right now it has every design notebook/binder that Steve Meretzky kept during the period of what most people consider “Classic” Infocom. This includes binders for:
Planetfall (1983)
Sorcerer (1984)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)
Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)
Stationfall (1987)
Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988)
Right there are nearly 4,000 pages of material to go through related to the production of these games.
Bear in mind: Steve did not mess around when it came to assembling these folders. He includes the light, drizzly roots of a given game, whether it be some cut-out newspaper articles or an exchange between employees of “what should Steve work on next”. (In some cases, heavy descriptions of the games Steve never got a chance to make, including a Titanic game and Minute Mysteries.) It then follows through many iterations of the maps, puzzles, references of any given work. Often, there are draft versions of the artwork and text for the manual and hint books, including all correspondence with outside vendors (like G/R, the copywrite/design group Infocom used heavily and which Steve has the occasional huge disagreement with). Then, once the game is functional, we have letters and feedback from playtesters.
(PLEASE NOTE: I HAVE REDACTED THE NAMES AND PERSONAL INFORMATION OF THE PLAYTESTERS INVOLVED – ORIGINAL UNREDACTED COPIES ARE NOT ONLINE BUT EXISTENT.)
For someone involved in game design, this is priceless work. Unfettered by the crushing schedules and indie limits of the current industry, the designers at Infocom (including Steve, but not limited to him by any means) were able to really explore what made games so much fun, where the medium could go, and what choices could be made. It’s all here.
But more than that, and I mean much more – Steve kept all the memos, business process, and related papers that were generated through Infocom Inc.’s life. Like, pretty much all of it.
You can read all about it
here and hit up the
Internet Archive for the actual files. This is insane and a great treasure for anyone interested in the history of video games.
