Technology Review: Author of Play

SM: It's kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge--not just of games, but of any computer application. They pushed the limits of computing power. To be able to type in sentences in natural English and have the computer understand them seemed really cool to players. Infocom also did some incredible things in terms of text compression, frequent-word algorithms, and the like that allowed us to get what at the time seemed like an extraordinary amount of material into a game.

TR: Infocom created a "Z-machine," which was a piece of software that could serve as a container for any Infocom game. When a new type of computer came out, you could adapt the Z-machine to that computer, and Infocom's entire library would immediately be available for it. How did that help the company?

SM: It was certainly a huge component of Infocom's competitive advantage. It was just hugely important in the early '80s, when there was a new, completely incompatible PC coming out once a month or so. Digital would come out with one, and HP would come out with one, and Tandy would come out with another, and NEC would come out with another, and there were just so many. I think at one point we had 20 different personal computers that we were supporting. The great thing was that it was almost free to move our game to some new computer even if it would only sell a hundred copies. And the other huge advantage was the speed with which we could respond to a new computer. The biggest success was when the Mac came out in 1984. We wrote a Mac interpreter, and got about 15 games running on the Mac, at a point when there were only maybe 15 other games in the entire universe that you could find for your Mac. So half of all the game titles that you could find for the Mac were ours.