For the people who don’t know, what exactly is a metapuzzle?

It’s a collection of puzzles that, when solved, each give a piece of a master puzzle.

My inspiration for metapuzzles was the 1973 whodunit, The Last of Sheila, co-authored by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. In it, the party guests had to play a different game every night, and when all six nights were finished, they had all the clues to a final puzzle, well, they would have had if the sadistic host hadn’t been murdered on the second night.`

In The Fool’s Errand, I took the idea a tad further. There were 56 puzzles that revealed the story and the pieces of the Sun’s Map. Then clues in the story revealed how to correctly assemble the Sun’s Map. Furthermore, once assembled, the Sun’s Map then revealed 14 more puzzles requiring further clues from the story. In this way, the Fool restores the 14 lost treasures of the land and finds what he was truly seeking.

And why did you decide to use the concept of metapuzzles to create a videogame (if any of your titles can be termed as such)?

The authorship of an original idea appealed to me. I already had a prototype of sorts.

In 1981, I created The Fool’s Errand as a homemade puzzle book to be solved in a few sittings. I penned the story based on the images of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck and I drafted the 81-piece map which had to be cut out and reassembled.

My effort was a direct counterpoint to the treasure book Masquerade by Kit Williams which both fascinated and frustrated me. I liked the idea of combining fantasy, story, art, and puzzles, but I disliked the idea that, due to a valuable prize, the puzzle was nigh impossible to solve.

Because The Fool’s Errand was a puzzle for its own sake, I was free to create a straightforward, no red herrings, unambiguous picture and puzzle adventure. Every piece was important and every piece was used only once.

What was your intention when first putting together The Fool’s Errand?

One day in 1983, my programmer friend, Allen Pinero, said to me “Hey Cliff, let’s make an adventure game and sell it!” And I said “Great! What’s an adventure game?” The resulting collaboration was Labyrinth of Crete for the Apple IIe published by Scott Adams.

Being a visual kind of guy, working on a text adventure was not as satisfying as I’d hoped. The Macintosh changed all that. I envisioned an adventure game with GAMES magazine-style puzzles (The American magazine spelled GAMES, not the British magazine spelled games). I almost did “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” with the Firesign Theater, but they bailed and I dusted off my copy of The Fool’s Errand book instead.

What was your inspiration for the artistic design in the game?

Drawing in pixels looked dreadfully cartoony in those days and I needed a way to create visuals that evoked the mystery of the Tarot. I’d seen various copyright-free silhouettes in Dover Book publications, and at USC Film School, I remember Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed which made splendid use of silhouette animation. Once I began using silhouettes on the computer, I found the images gained such depth and imagination, more for what was not seen, than for what was seen. It was the perfect solution.

Then I used a video camera to digitize crumpled cloth, and from those abstract images, I cut and pasted clouds and atmosphere to complete the backgrounds.

In the time of 400K floppies, disk space was a grave concern and I could only afford so many bitmap illustrations for the game. For economy, I used patterns and geometric animations as transitions between puzzles and story which lent a certain optical illusion aspect which I found to be complementary to the puzzles and fantasy.

Was it difficult completing the game’s development?

I felt like Sisyphus forever rolling the boulder up a hill in Hades. I had developed the whole thing in 30 separate files of Microsoft BASIC which was interpretative and basically useless for publication. Fortunately, a new product, ZBasic, appeared which allowed me to create a single compiled application. The conversion process from one BASIC to another was my first taste of re-inventing the wheel, the chassis, the transmission, and the engine block. Not for the squeamish.

Was it difficult getting the whole thing published at all?

It was very easy to get it published. Paul Mithra of Miles Computing immediately understood the game and pushed it to market. The Fool’s Errand languished on the shelf, however, until Neil Shapiro praised it in MacUser magazine, a nerve-racking 8 months later. Then all the other magazines reviewed it; and the game was translated to MS-DOS; and Electronic Arts took over the distribution; and I could finally pay off $50,000 in credit card debt that I spent to create it.

Were you surprised at how popular The Fool’s Errand was and the reaction that it got from the people who played it?

What surprises me more is the reaction the game still receives today. I’m recruiting True Believers every week at my website www.thefoolandhismoney.com. It’s wonderfully gratifying to have 15-year old product still running on Macintosh and Windows. My modest Hollywood career didn’t prepare me for the ever-changing standards of multimedia where entertainment products can disappear — forever.

Do you think it might have inspired other games that have come out since, besides those created by yourself?

I daresay The Fool’s Errand was instrumental in introducing “hands-on visual puzzles” to the early text/picture adventure games.

All your titles have appeared in Mac format, even though it’s not the most widely supported format around - do you have a preference for Macs over PCs when it comes to creating games like The Fool’s Errand?

I might never have created The Fool’s Errand if it were not for the Macintosh. I bought a 512K “fat” Mac in late 1984. I was one of “the rest of us” who needed a user-friendly interface to coax me, kicking and screaming, into the computer age.

Do I have a preference? I want a third computer which has all the good qualities of the two and none of the bad. And a home on the Riviera, 25% bank interest, and flying cars.

For the record, The Fool and his Money is for both Macintosh and Windows.

Why has The Fool And His Money been so long in coming out, considering The Fool’s Errand appeared in 1987?

I needed author-friendly technology. With the release of Macromedia’s Director MX and Flash MX early this year, I finally had the tools to design for the Macintosh and Windows simultaneously.

Why did you decide to do a sequel in the first place?

I’d always envisioned a trilogy — The Fool’s Errand, The Fool and his Money, and The Fool’s Paradise. My timing was a bit off, that’s all.

Do you worry that in the age of games having ‘great graphics’ in order to get attention, that TFAHM might get overlooked (bearing in mind that this is exactly what we’re trying to prevent with a piece like this)?

What can I say? I can’t worry myself about that which I am not. I’m a raven in a horse show. I don’t gallop or leap hedges. But I’ve other tricks up my sleeve.

People play my games for my authorship and imagination — the tall tale, the unique art direction, and enough “ah-ha’s!” to keep ‘em grinning, ear-to-ear.

Like “Field of Dreams,” I trust “if you build it, they will come.”

More Questions from June 2005

Do people really come up to you and say that they hate you?

Absolutely. It’s like a secret handshake.

What’s your response to something like that?

I encourage it — what better compliment could I ask for? When people gleefully declare that they hate me, that also means they’ve solved each and every puzzle in the game, and that they’ve seen through all my little tricks and misdirections, no matter how long it took, and they beat me. I find no joy in frustrating people. I want people to solve my games. I want people to have a good time.

Do you prefer working on the puzzles that make up your games rather than the games themselves?

Actually not. I equally enjoy every aspect of the production process. I came to games from filmmaking and I’ve been making films since I was in the eighth grade. When it comes to creating puzzles, I favor having a wide variety of challenges, none too difficult in and of itself. I am more interested in creating a winding path of puzzles with a sense of rhythm and flow rather than in creating high brick walls and Mt. Everests. I want, whenever a player sits down to play, for that person to feel like they’ve accomplished something every twenty minutes or so. To my way of thinking, puzzles are another element of storytelling and every good book ought to give its reader a chance to bookmark the page and turn off the nightlight with a satisfied grin.

And is it particularly difficult coming up with the ‘surrounding’ elements of your titles - the plot and setting especially, seeing as the puzzle elements are generally fairly comparable across all your titles?

Not at all. I have far more ideas than I’ll ever have the opportunity to explore. What fascinates me most in life is mythology, that grand predilection of humans to organize the world into fantastic schemes of legends, heroes, and artistry. My games spring from mythology whether it be Tarot cards, the Greek Gods, or a world of numbers and letters inside a computer. Adding a treasure hunt of puzzles is my unique contribution to that pageantry.

Why did you decide to make your past titles available for free on your own website, rather than choosing a more financially sensible path of charging for them?

A proverb goes, “Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” I offer the old games free of charge as a reminder to those who have played them and as an invitation to those who have not. I am heralding that The Fool and his Money is on its way and that you can pre-order it from my website and have your name immortalized in the Compendium of True Believers inside the game. I am self-publishing this game. I need to reach out to my audience again.

You’ve worked on ‘real world’ puzzles as well as videogame ones (the David Blaine book most notably) - is that kind of thing different than a game to work on in terms of time and effort?

Although the scope of production was considerably less, I’d say the time and effort spent on the design phase was considerably more. The prize was $100,000 and nobody wanted the book to be solved in the first week of publication. The trick was, how do you create a puzzle evident enough to be noticed but obscure enough not to be noticed? It was the experience of a lifetime. I still have four lost souls e-mailing me about the “real” location of the treasure.

Commonly, development delays in the games industry are met with scorn and anger by gamers... can you explain why it is that you’ve garnered nothing but support for The Fool And His Money?

One person wrote, “You’re the only fool I’ll gladly suffer,” and I think that says everything. The general feeling is that, after seventeen years, the sequel to The Fool’s Errand is still worth waiting for, though many have remarked on the irony of pre-ordering a game called The Fool and his Money.