The Frood by Jem Roberts

Author:Jem Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781409052357
Publisher: Random House

Pick Up Plotter: Your Load Is Too Heavy

The lure of the Apple Mac and the excitement of working with Meretzky on a positively pioneering project were good for Douglas, though all but guaranteed to inspire ulcers in Sonny Mehta and the team at Pan, who were holding on for the fourth instalment of Arthur Dent’s adventures as 1984 progressed. Adams knew this, and made several concerted attempts to drag the words out of his imagination. He even headed down to the West Country to get away from it all, booking himself into Huntsham Court in Somerset for several weeks of uninterrupted creative genius. Sadly, his deep pockets and gregarious nature made good friends of his hosts on the very first night – he even invested in the hotel – and large swathes of his stay were subsequently spent sampling the most expensive wines in Huntsham’s cellars, so he was to head back to Islington with little to show for the trip (besides, that was, a cheque for £25,000, half the payment for an American Hitchhiker calendar which never reached the printers, and the easiest money Adams ever made).

Creating the Hitchhiker game was by far the best alternative to composing SLATFATFish – the ultimate form of procrastination, combining experimentation with new technology with the promise of a tasty payday at the end of it. With time running short for making the Christmas market, Meretzky joined Adams at Huntsham to devise some of the craftier sections of the game, jointly coming up with the final puzzle while strolling on the beach of the Exmoor National Park. Naturally, Adams was never one to approach any project with anything less than an ultimate determination to be original, and the idea of believable interaction between program and player was to become a lifelong fascination, as he explained: ‘One of the things I’d first been told about interactive fiction turned me off it, which was the idea that the audience, the reader, determines what happens. I’d been told grossly simplistic things about it … It sounded like the writer abdicating. Once you get involved in writing these things, you discover that it’s not the writer abdicating at all, it’s the writer taking a completely different kind of control. It’s rather like the experience of being a stand-up comic. You go and watch, for instance, Barry Humphries, one of the most brilliant guys there is at knowing how to play with an audience – what you see him do is appear to be continually inventing new material depending on what he gets from the audience … he misleads them into thinking that when they heckle, they’re actually coming up with original stuff. They’re not, because he’s done enough audiences to know exactly what an audience is going to say now, and he has this extraordinary sort of filing system in the back of his mind, which means that whatever the audience comes up with, he has got a response that, with a tiny bit of instant tailoring, will fit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.