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Northway: Was the commercial death of Interactive Fiction (IF) inevitable? Could it have survived, and what do you see as its successor?

Yes, I think it was inevitable. In the first half of the Eighties, parser-driven text adventures were simply the coolest game you could make on a home computer. But by the late-eighties, that was no longer true. The existence of the hobbyist IF market has demonstrated that there continues to be a niche for IF, but not a large enough niche to support you [if] doing it for profit rather than passion.

IF had two main components: narrative and puzzles. Narrative ‘graduated’ from IF and has found its way into virtually every genre of electronic games, from console-based shooters to casual mobile puzzle games. Puzzles (‘brain teasers’, not jigsaw/crossword puzzles), don’t have as obvious a descendant or descendants… actually, I think the place where that experience can best be found today is escape rooms!

Antiriad2097: When writing Hitchhiker’s, did you cut anything that expanded on the book?

No, nothing I can think of. The game was made on such a tight schedule, we didn’t have time to design anything other than what we absolutely needed to get the game done. I’m sure there must have been some supernascent ideas that never went anywhere, but I can’t recall a single example.

Richl: What were your opinions of Magnetic Scrolls?

The Imps were always very impressed with Magnetic Scrolls. There was a constant stream of competitors that were trying to ‘beat’ us at the text adventure game. In the early Eighties, there was a company at the other end of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Kendall Square) called Spinnaker, which laid out big bucks to make deals with a bunch of big-name authors (Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, etc) which has us worried at first, until they were released. Some of these were more collaborative relationships than others, but all were universally terrible. Synapse Software released one or more IF games with a much-ballyhooed parser they called ‘BTZ’ (Better Than Zork). It wasn’t. But Magnetic Scrolls was the first time we thought that anyone was making games that were parser-wise or writing-wise on a par with what we were doing. We were also on good terms with them and hung out at trade shows.