[MUD-Dev] Re: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! -- By ErnestAdam s

[Koster]

On Tuesday, May 19, 1998 10:00 AM Caliban Tiresias Darklock
[SMTP:caliban at darklock.com] said:
> On 07:11 AM 5/19/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Koster, Raph jumping
up
> to say:
> >
> >Anyone remember the infamous "Hitchhiker's" Gotcha, whereby if
> >you did not feed a sandwich to the dog in the first five moves, near
the
> >end of the game he ate the microscopic fleet you were in? And
speaking
> >of lateral thinking and bizarre puzzles, that one fits... 
> 
> I'd hazard the proposal that anyone who bought the HHGTTG game
*expected*
> things to be extremely lateral and bizarre, myself. Yes, I was
frustrated
> as hell and cursed Douglas Adams thousands of times over the course of
that
> game, but it was pretty much what I was letting myself in for in the
first
> place...

Oh, I'd agree. Which is why I took that article with a big grain of salt
when I first saw it on Gamasutra weeks ago, and still do. :) I loved
Infocom's work,and it was full of blatantly surrealistic stuff, cases of
bizarre lateral thinking that turned out to make sense when seen
cockeyed, fiction-shattering references (Infidel featured a mention of
the Egyptian god Neutrogena), mazes (of course), and other no-nos. I
think the lesson to take away from what the article says is that all of
those things can be extremely annoying--unless they are well presented.
What he describes as the "canonical RPG experience" (which he says
sucks) is the sum total of the gameplay of Diablo, which has sold over a
million copies. It was just done very very well.

-Raph

--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.