watching it rise

Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

For obvious reasons, I can’t share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It’s just too good.

So let’s start with the most notorious — Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here’s the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

I haven’t played Half-Life. But this review of Half-Life 2 complete with wallpaper sized, garden gnome filled screenshots makes me want to:

Sometime halfway through reviewing Episode Two Doug Lombardi, I think it was, asks me if I know about the gnome achievement.

“No?”
“Did you find the gnome near the start?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to put him in the rocket before it launches.”
“But isn’t that right near the end of the game?”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that mean you have to-”
“Yeah.”
“Oh I’m so doing that.”

Keith Stuart interviews Richard Bartle, one of the creators of the first MUD:

MUD has little that today’s virtual worlds don’t, but it lacks something they do have which makes it worth looking at: baggage. In today’s virtual worlds, there are many components that are only there because they were in the worlds that the designers played. These things work, but the designers don’t know - or even consider - why they work. A designer will ask “what character classes are we going to have?” when they should first ask “are we going to have character classes?”. Only when they have decided that yes, they are going to have them, will they know why they want them, and therefore why they are important.
– Richard Bartle