~5 minute readDESIGNER'S PROFILE
Dave Anderson (author of Hollywood Hi-Jinx)
"B"io of a "B" Movie Fan
This article may include low-quality writing or editing by the original author or publisher. It is the policy of InvisiClues.org to reproduce articles as they were originally published, including any typographical, editorial, or factual errors. You are forewarned.
What do Johnny Carson, Sonny Tufts, Morgan Fairchild, Xavier Cugat, and Roger Corman (the king of "B" movie moguls) have in common? What do "Plan 9 From Outer Space," "2,000 Maniacs," and "Make Them Die Slowly" have to do with Infocom's new Hollywood Hi-Jinx? The former are all celebrity names which are dropped in the course of playing the game (though the author denies that the black cat heading in the direction of Johnny Carson's house is Joan Rivers' familiar) and the latter are the classic "B" movies which spawned the satirical spoof on tinseltown.
Dave Anderson, the author of Hollywood Hi-Jinx, blames the conception of the game on television. Where else could he have seen movies so bad that he wondered why producers would bother? He perceives the program as a tribute to "B" movies.
You may be wondering how a relatively normal journalism major from California State University at Fullerton could end up as author of a major software program. It all began with a biology class where class members were given a limited password to the school's mainframe. The simple idea was for each student to analyze his/her diet using a diet program. Unfortunately for the lovely young co-ed in the cubicle next to him, Anderson stole her password and began to explore the system. Spending in excess of five hours of her computer time, he left the lab with a severe headache, a desire to learn more, and nothing accomplished. Later, a friend purchased an Atari 800 and they attempted to learn basic from books checked out of the school library. They didn't get anywhere until they found Atari BASIC for Kids.
That was his beginning, but his present opportunities came about as a result of his securing a position in the testing department of Infocom in 1983. He soon became the department head in testing and began to receive attention from the creative staff due to some humorous material he was writing in Infodope, the in-house newsletter at Infocom (and I thought it was the in-house name for people like me who rarely play text-adventures). In 1985, he was invited to become a writer. Liz Cyr-Jones presented him with an idea for a "haunted house" mystery. Haunted houses, however, are old hat, so the idea evolved via one-page synopsis into the present idea. As it evolved, Aunt Hildegarde was originally supposed to be a supermarket tabloid seeress and the Malibu beach house something like a cut-rate Winchester Mystery House. Anderson decided, however, that he didn't know enough about the occult (even the "pop" versions thereof), but he did know about "B" movies. It seems that he and Brian Moriarty have devoted a major portion of their lives to seeking out the worst of celluloid history. The "B" movies angle allowed the introduction of movie properties into the storyline and facilitated the present shape of the game. This also gave him a chance to indulge in another avocation. As a high school student, Anderson had reveled in writing reviews of non-existent movies with outrageous titles. If Uncle Buddy was a "B" movie producer, he could run rampant with phony movie titles.
When asked about his inspiration for certain ideas in the plot line, Anderson was fascinatingly candid. Uncle Buddy's picture was a serendipitous discovery. Dave and his producer couldn't agree on how Uncle Buddy should look. One wanted early sleaze and the other wanted contemporary schmooze. They went to a local stock photo house in Boston and searched the files for the "perfect" Uncle Buddy. The search was futile, but on the way home, they discovered that the manager of the photo place was an excellent compromise of their respective images. They asked the manager if he'd serve as the model, a deal was struck, and Uncle Buddy had a visual incarnation. Another important character came to life in the stock photo shop, as well. The shop had a file of mailman photographs. While thumbing through the file, the bizarre imagery of Buck Palace, fighting mailman, took shape.
For those interested in the nuts and bolts of the game's design, the Infocom process works something like this. After approval of the one page synopsis, the author begins to write on the company's DEC 20 mainframe. Infocom has its own programming language which is used on the mainframe and converts readily into the languages used by different machines on the market. It is corporate policy for the new games to be developed off of the most recent parser. This means that Hollywood Hijinx was built off of the Wishbringer parser. Since Moriarty, like his fiendish fictional namesake, had put in some personalized programming touches which diabolically appeared at the most inopportune times during the creation of Hollywood Hijinx, Anderson had to spend a great deal of time removing Wishbringer references from the program. Fortunately for Anderson, Dave Liebling (author of Maze Wars on the Macintosh) was around to solve some of the programming problems.
In addition to some of the more mundane programming problems, Liebling was responsible for the complex Hedge Maze found in Aunt Hildy's garden. The maze consists of 828 possible locations, but only 260 of them actually unique. Liebling crunched the entire maze into a table so that the memory required is equivalent to one room description. Steve Meretzky was also a help in the program design. Meretzky is really more of a catalyst than designer. Nevertheless, those of you who have suffered over the elevator puzzle have Steve to thank for it.
Asked if his journalism background (including the time spent as Production Manager for the California State University at Los Angeles' school paper) was of any value in the world of game design, Anderson replied with an unequivocal yes. He believes that the ability to summarize a lot of facts in a short amount of space is indispensable when writing adventure games. After all, the less space used in non-essential description allows for the inclusion of more germane data. Asked if the puzzles in Hollywood Hijinx weren't less deadly than the average Infocom adventure, he also replied in the affirmative. After all, the player is a favorite nephew of Uncle Buddy and Aunt Hildegarde and they wouldn't want to kill him, just test him. Asked if he resented people trying strange things in his games, Anderson claimed that he did not. However, he does point out that most of the cannon balls are welded together as ornaments and the cannon too heavy for one person to move so that players wouldn't be firing anywhere and at will. We resent being called a "geek," however, simply because we tried to open the front door with Buck Palace's bazooka. It could have been real.
This article appeared in
Computer Gaming World
May 1987
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
