COMPUTE! ISSUE 57 / FEBRUARY 1985 / PAGE 44
Michael
Crichton
There are new ways of presenting
information other than the traditional ways in which the viewer or
reader is required to be passive. A few years ago, I realized that 1
didn't know about these things, and that I'd better find out about
them. The only way I could learn was to actually go and do one. So I
said, "Well, I'll just make a game and then I'll learn." And I
certainly did.
Interactive fiction-the adventure game-is one of those new ways. And
Michael Crichton is one of the newest authors in this genre.
Crichton is better known for his work in fiction and
films. His novels include The
Andromeda Strain, The
Terminal Man, and Congo.
As a filmmaker, he has been involved in the writing and directing of Westworld, Coma, The Great Train Robbery,
Looker, and the recently released Runaway.
The rapid growth of technology-and the decisions it
necessarily forces on societies-has been a major theme in much of
Crichton's work. He's been interested in the artistic potential of
microcomputers since the start, and owns several himself, including an
Apple, a Commodore 64, a Radio Shack Model 100, and several IBM PCs.
Crichton has used his micros primarily for word
processing and game playing, but was especially intrigued by the
possibilities that lay in adventure gaming, and disappointed that games
weren't being more cleverly designed.
I simply didn't
understand the mentality that informed them. It was not until 1 began
programming myself that I realized it was a debugger's mentality. They
could make you sit outside a door until you said exactly the right
words. Sometimes you had to say, "I quit," and then it would let you
through.
Well, that's life
in the programming world. It's not life in any other world. It's not an
accepted dramatic convention in any other arena of entertainment. It's
something you learn to do when you're trying to make the computer work.
So in 1982, eager to explore this participatory art
form, Crichton started to script his own adventure game. Since the only
computer language he knew well was BASIC, he hired programmer Steve
Warrady to help translate his story into graphics and text using Apple
assembly language.
I wanted to make a
game that tended to reflect my own prejudices. My prejudice is that I'm
not a fantasist. I don't like magic spells to get me across the river
and I don't like to meet trolls and dwarfs. I got tired of that when I
was six.
So I wanted to
have a more realistic world. In Amazon, when you get to the river and
find the boat that has a hole in it, there are three ways to patch it.
And they're all things that would work with a real boat. You just use
your head and say, "What would I do with the material available to me
in the real world-this tangible world we all know about-that would
work?"
Another prejudice: In
Amazon, you can't solve your problems
with violence. In general, as you go along, you'd better be more clever
than violent.
And another: The mazes
in this game are only there for punitive reasons. I loathe mazes. I
think they're a programmer's trick. They make the game slower and
longer without being a very complicated programming task and not very
interesting. If you make a mistake in Amazon-and it generally has to
be a bad mistake-you get dumped in a maze.
Crichton discovered something surprising along the
way: There wasn't much difference between writing an adventure game and
scripting a movie.
Every
consideration in making a movie is to try to see what the audience is
thinking. Have I shown them this long enough? Did they get this point?
Can they tell what this sound is?
In writing an
adventure game, those considerations are merely formalized, since the
audience will in fact be literally responding. So 1 have to think, "If
they're outside this door, what will they think? Will they be afraid to
go in? What would a person do in this situation?"
Here's what I
found out early on: You can't have extremely varied choices that don't
seem to matter. 1 can go north, south, east, or west, and who cares?
You can only do that for a while, and then if you don't start to have
an expectation of what will happen, you'll stop playing the game. You'd
better get right going and you'd better start to have something happen.
If I play a game
for a half-hour and it doesn't make any sense to me, I'll just quit and
never go back. Say I'm locked in this house and I don't know what the
point of the house is and why I can't get out and there's no sort of
hint to me about the mentality that would assist me in getting out-I
don't know. I could say "Shazam!" or I could burn the house down
or-give me a break. I just stop.
Crichton, a professional storyteller, took
tremendous care with the plot, the actual story line of Amazon. I think about a plot as being a
story where you can imagine the consequences as you go. It's like the
little guy who yells at the screen, "Look behind you, Hoppy!" You must
know something the character doesn't. The audience has an
expectation-if you go in this room, the bad guy will be there. That's
plot.
At a certain point in the process of designing
Amazon-after all the material
was generated, all the possible plot
twists, and settings and characters were either accepted or
rejected-Crichton started treating the game like a movie. He and his
programmer and graphic designer collaborated like the creative and
technical forces of a film crew collaborate.
The game took 18 months from start to finish,
perhaps a bit longer than most videogames, but as Crichton says, they
were all learning. We're not a
professional software company. We're just some people making a program.
Trillium approached Crichton to acquire book rights
about the time he was polishing Amazon.
They came to me and said they wanted to do a series of adventure games
based on novels and I said, "Guess what? I just finished one." It was
absolute coincidence.
Amazon has
its share of bad guys, but they're generally human, unlike the
high-tech villains in many of his other creations. Technology, though,
is not the enemy. Crichton thinks that he may have been misunderstood
in the past.
Everyone remembers
the scene in Westworld where Yul Brynner is a robot that runs amok. But
there is a very specific scene where people discuss whether or not to
shut down the resort. I think the movie was as much about that decision
as anything. They just didn't think it was really going to happen.
I don't see
technology as being out there, doing bad things to us people, like
we're inside the circle of covered wagons and technology is out there
firing arrows at us. We're making the technology and it is a
manifestation of how we think. To the extent that we think
egotistically and irrationally and paranoically and foolishly, then we
have technology that will give us nuclear winters or cars that won't
brake. But that's because people didn't design them right.
esides characters and stories from books and movies,
other famous personalities and trends have been incorporated into
entertainment software.
The recent awareness of breakdancing has spawned at
least two computer games: Break
Street, by Creative Software, and Breakdance, by Epyx. Both games
feature breakdancers performing various steps, and allow you to
choreograph your own dances or imitate routines already created.
Epyx has also released three other programs based on
famous faces. In Barbie, you
can do the same things that young girls have done with Barbie dolls for
25 years: shop for or design clothes, style and color Barbie's hair,
and dress her up. G. I. Joe,
taken from the familiar child's toy, lets you select a battle situation
and outfit your soldier to fight. And everyone gets to try for revenge
on Mr. Hart in 9 To 5 Typing,
a typing tutorial using characters from the movie 9 To 5.
J.R. haters don't have to wait until Friday night to
see their favorite villain. Datasoft's Dallas Quest, a text and graphics
adventure, puts you in South Fork and pits you against the TV show's
bad guys as you try to succeed in a dangerous task given to you by Sue
Ellen. Datasoft has also recently released Conan, based on Arnold
Schwartzenegger's musclebound hero, and Bruce Lee, based on the karate
expert of film fame.
Commodore and Marvel Adventures, along with the
programming talent of Scott Adams, have designed an adventure game
based on the television show The Hulk.
The player controls the intellect of both Bruce Banner and his alter
ego, the big green guy, as he struggles to unlock the riddle of the
Chief Examiner.
Cartoon characters continue to show up in games,
too. Sierra On-Line, which brought you BC's Quest For Tires, has licensed
some of Walt Disney's creations for use in educational software. Donald Duck's Playground helps
develop money-handling skills, as well as shape, color, and
letter-matching abilities. Mickey's
Space Adventure promotes the development of mapping and
problem-solving skills while teaching about the solar system. And Winnie The Pooh In The Hundred Acre Wood
encourages good mapping and reading skills.
Spy vs. Spy,
the cartoon strip series from the pages of MAD magazine, is now a computer
game, published by First Star Software. In it, the White Spy and the
Black Spy play tricks on each other and oppose each other in
competitive, humorous, and dangerous situations.
big name doesn't guarantee a superior game, but it may
improve sales. And when a personality doesn't just endorse a product,
but is actually involved in its design and production, you've probably
got a better than average program-if the individual was working within
his or her own area of expertise.
Filmmakers and play producers try to get "names" for
their shows, not only because they'll draw bigger crowds, but because,
generally, that person had to evidence some talent to become a name in
the first place.
Will people buy software if a superstar was involved
in its making? Does Michael Crichton think that his name will influence
people to buy Amazon?
"I don't know. What do you think?" he says. "I don't
think it matters. I think what's important is that it's a good game."
