Download issue cgw_37 - Computer Gaming World Museum

ducer, he could run rampant with phony movie titles.
When asked about his inspiration for certain
ideas in the plot line, Anderson was fascinatingly
candid. Uncle Buddy's picture was a serendipitous
discovery. Dave and his producer couldn't agree on
how Uncle Buddy should look. One wanted early
sleaze and the other wanted contemporary
schmooze. They went to a local stock photo house
in Boston and searched the files for the "perfect"
Uncle Buddy. The search was futile, but on the
way home, they discovered that the manager of the
photo place was an excellent compromise of their
respective images. They asked the manager if he'd
serve as the model, a deal was struck, and Uncle
Buddy had a visual incarnation. Another important
character came to life in the stock photo shop, as
well. The shop had a file of mailman photographs.
While thumbing through the file, the bizarre imagery
of Buck Palace, fighting mailman, took
shape.
For those interested in the nuts and bolts of the
game's design, the Infocom process works something
like this. After approval of the one page synopsis,
the author begins to write on the company's
DEC 20 mainframe. Infocom has its own programming
language which is used on the mainframe and
converts readily into the languages used by different
machines on the market. It is corporate policy
for the new games to be developed off of the most
recent parser. This means that Hollywood Hijinx
was built off of the Wishbringer parser. Since Moriarty,
like his fiendish fictional namesake, had put
in some personalized programming touches which
diabolically appeared at the most inopportune times
during the creation of Hollywood Hijinx, Anderson
had to spend a great deal of time removing Wishbringer
references from the program. Fortunately
for Anderson, Dave Liebling (author of Maze Wars
on the Macintosh) was around to solve some of the
programming problems.
In addition to some of the more mundane programming
problems, Liebling was responsible for
the complex Hedge Maze found in Aunt Hildy's
garden. The maze consists of 828 possible locations,
but only 260 of them actually unique. Liebling
crunched the entire maze into a table so that the
memory required is equivalent to one room description.
Steve Meretzky was also a help in the
program design. Meretzky is really more of a catalyst
than designer. Nevertheless, those of you who
have suffered over the elevator puzzle have Steve
to thank for it.
Asked if his journalism background (including
the time spent as Production Manager for the California
State University at Los Angeles' school paper)
was of any value in the world of game design,
Anderson replied with an unequivocal yes. He believes
that the ability to summarize a lot of facts in
a short amount of space is indispensable when
writing adventure games. After all, the less space
used in non-essential description allows for the inclusion
of more germane data. Asked if the puzzles
in Hollywood Hijinx weren't less deadly than the
average Infocom adventure, he also replied in the
affirmative. After all, the player is a favorite
nephew of Uncle Buddy and Aunt Hildegarde and
they wouldn't want to kill him, just test him.
Asked if he resented people trying strange things in
his games, Anderson claimed that he did not.
However, he does point out that most of the cannon
balls are welded together as ornaments and the
cannon too heavy for one person to move so that
players wouldn't be firing anywhere and at will. We
resent being called a "geek," however, simply because
we tried to open the front door with Buck
Palace's bazooka. It could have been real.