Zarf Updates

One of my goals with this project is to put the Infocom games, and the code, into context. Context is the fun part.

Some of my friends got into it about this quote:

Or, from Appendix A:

CONTFCN: I never use this, why should you?

Or Appendix B:

Frankly, I think the SEARCHBIT is a stupid concept, and I automatically give the SEARCHBIT to all containers.

Several other sections say "Stu should write this" as well.

Let's set aside what these ZIL terms mean. The question is, how is this flippin' useful? In a reference manual? Who writes documentation like this?

The title page says "Comments to SEM" -- Steve (Eric) Meretzky. So that answers who. "Stu" is clearly Stu Galley, one of the original Implementors and the architect of the "new" (V6) parser.

But that's the author, not the context. For the context, let's take a look at the entire title page:

Suddenly we know a lot more! What happened in May of 1989? (Aside from me passing my first college programming course.) That's right -- the shuttering of Infocom as a Cambridge studio.

Quoting from Jimmy Maher's article on the fall of Infocom:

The axe fell over the course of that long afternoon and evening [May 4th]. Infocom would be “moving” to California, where it was to be reconstituted and re-imagined as a more closely coupled subsidiary of Mediagenic [aka Activision], under a “general manager” named Rob Sears. Just 11 of the 26 current employees were offered positions at this new version of Infocom. [...] Suffice to say that those Mediagenic decided were desirable to retain often weren’t the pivotal creative voices you might expect, and that only 5 of the 11 accepted the offer anyway. [...] For the other old-timers, it was all over. Another six weeks or so to finish a few final projects and tidy up the place, and that would be that.

-- "Moving to California", Digital Antiquarian, July 2016

The five who stayed on definitely did not include Meretzky:

Steve Meretzky had been scheduled to attend the Computer Game Developers’ Conference that very weekend in Sunnyvale, California. He was still allowed to fly out on Infocom’s dime, but replaced the company’s name on his badge with “Make Me an Offer!”

(That would have been the third CGDC, which reached the stunning total of 300 people in 1989. The event I'm attending next month will be probably 100 times that size... give or take...)

So. We have a manual which was written either a couple of months before the axe fell, or a couple of weeks after. Nothing exactly says which, but my sense is "before". This is a document written for an incoming writer who wants to make a game. It's not a historical document written for posterity.

However, there's clearly a sense of resignation hanging over the whole endeavour. The document's subtitle gives you that up front. Infocom was already down to a quarter the size of its 1985-ish heyday, with no recent hits and no real prospect of a new one.

So.

Footnote 1: Is it possible that the document was written earlier, and was just updated through 1989?

Some of it, possibly. But the "Stu?" sections give the sense that this was interrupted in mid-draft, not written as a complete document and then later updated.

Also, it mentions YZIP (Z-machine version 6), albeit not in a great deal of detail. (One line just says "see YZIP Spec for more details".) The first YZIP game was Zork Zero in October 1988; the YZIP Spec document is dated "11/30/88". The design work would have started earlier, but this still puts a pretty sharp lower bound on the writing span for Learning ZIL.

Footnote 2: The document is also tagged as "Conversion to Microsoft Word -- SEM -- 8/1/95". In 1995, Meretzky was off at Boffo Games, his new studio. What prompted him to pull a six-year-old text file out of his (copious) archives and update it into a "modern" format?

I have no idea, actually. Maybe the assembly of the Masterpieces of Infocom CD-ROM collection, which had a number of bonus items on it. (Including my first IFComp entry!) The Learning ZIL document wasn't among them, but it might have been part of a round-up of resources.