~1 minute readThey're writing as fast as they can: Witness
Infocom's long-awaited second mystery game is finally announced, and it was worth waiting for. The advance word is that it tops the highly acclaimed and tremendously popular Deadline.
"Witness is really wonderful."
Marc Blank, author of Deadline and Zork
Topping Deadline will be quite an achievement. Deadline has received rave reviews (even The New Zork Times called it “a milestone”).
Electronic Games magazine (primarily a video game magazine) awarded it the “Best Computer Adventure – 1983.” Deadline was voted the #2 adventure in Softalk magazine's poll of its readers. After a year on the market, it is still at the top of the sales charts –- very rare in this fast-moving market.
But Witness is up to the challenge. Once again, you are the detective who must solve the crime, but this time you are in a classic 1930's setting and the murder takes place before your very eyes.
"There is a great deal of mood setting –- the atmosphere is great!" says Marc Blank. "Although there are fewer characters in Witness, they are much better developed and more interesting. There is significantly more conversation, and the game is richer in detail."
The author of Witness is Stu Galley. One of Infocom's founders, he worked in the same group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science as Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Joel Berez (Infocom's president), and Mike (the founder of the Zork Users Group). Stu’s background is physics (B.S. Caltech, M.S. MIT), which may seem odd training for writing mysteries, but Stu is an excellent writer, and is very well-read. In short, he is a true renaissance man.
"Stu is really great at the subtle things."
Steve Meretzky, author of Planetfall
As usual, Witness introduces improvements in Infocom's parser (the program which understands the sentences you type in). No one else has come close to Infocom's language-handling abilities, which are continually improving.
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