Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: pshepard@nyx.cs.du.edu (Pat Shepard)
Subject: Re: Cheerful thought of the day.
Message-ID: <1994Jan21.025225.26504@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
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Date: Fri, 21 Jan 94 02:52:25 GMT
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I think that the situation is this: Text adventures have no market.
 
That's a truly sad situation, and it is even more sad for authors of
shareware IF.  Why shareware in particular?  Because shareware has a
much harder time *creating* markets.  No advertising revenue to grab
the interest of the general public, no reviews in magazines to tell
potential consumers "Hey, this is as good as Infocom."  No product in
stores to attract impulse buys (shareware does everything it can to
*avoid* impulse buys - look the address up in the readme file, write
a check, mail an envelope and voila, two weeks [or more] later it 
shows up).
 
The big companies aren't interested in buying text adventures -
they're addicted to the multimedia future.  Small companies can't
afford to take risks (and marketing IF would be a risk).
 
*And* LTOI offers games that are (or at least will be assumed to be)
better, for much less money.  I imagine that many people in this groupo
have played them all, but even here many haven't.  And the consumer
base as a whole?  The point here is, even *were* there an IF market,
LTOI would likely fill it, not shareware.
 
I'll venture a possible solution.  Any successful IF will have to be
marketed to Hell and back.  Send a copy to every reviewer for every
computer magazine - maybe you'll get a review or two.  More important,.
realize you're competing with Infocom classics at $3 apiece.  If you
want to make $30, you're going to have to do better than Infocom.  In
fact, you're going to have to make Infocom look paltry.

I'm certain it can be done.  Infocom is a dozen years out of date,
and I've seen some great ideas around here.  But most of those ideas
have gone unrealized.  IF isn't going to go forward without movement
in interface design (esp. interaction with NPCs), simulated items
(rather than hardcoded items), radically non-linear plots, etc.
 
And *that* is going to take a lot of hard work, and just as much
cleverness.  Infocom taught us we needed to be authors to do IF well.
Unfortunately, we forgot that we need to be programmers as well if
we don't want IF to remain static.

