Questions
asked by Martin Mathers from games™
magazine - November 2003 & June
2005
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.
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