Re: Marketing, was Re: C


12 Dec 1995 18:01:39 GMT

In article <kkn6DeG00WB40Jv_Uz@andrew.cmu.edu>, erkyrath+@CMU.EDU says...
>
>To be completely honest, I think a lot of it is Golden Age Syndrome.
>Anything ten years old is terrific. We remember _Beyond Zork_. Anyone

That's a good point, but I don't believe entirely true. I certainly had favorite
authors - anything Steve Meretzky (sp?) touched was gold as far as I'm concerned. But
no, Moonmist and several dozen others are pretty lousy. The last story I read,
Plundered Hearts (as mentioned by J Winkler) isn't all that old, but probably one of
the best IF stories written, as far as I'm concerned.

>I think that YES there are games on gmd.de which are the equal of
>Infocom's. (And not just Graham's, either. :-)
>
>Advantages that Infocom had that we currently lack:
>
>1) Much more beta-testing. No game I've seen here has been really
>polished until the second or third *public* release.

I agree that there are games on a level with Infocom's available; but most of them
aren't polished enough (even, ahem... Graham's (IMHO)); the problem being that yes,
they were a company working full-time at this stuff. (although I'm made to wonder
just how many hours a week Graham puts in?) We could certainly use more beta-testing;
Graham relies (I believe) on Gareth and others to beta-test his stuff; that could be
expanded.

Also, what about the tools we use? What sorts of fundamental improvements could we
make? I've considered modifying an interpreter so that I could edit the messages in
my story file, then UNDO to see how it looks and sounds. (even if I made
modifications to save the whole story file, I would still lose my interactive edits on
the next compile) What about being able to edit CODE during test-play?

>What we can do about it:
>
>There is nothing we can do about it.
>

YIKES! That's a little stiff. How about some more thoughts from the peanut gallery
before we live with a dictum like that?

-Parse