Gunness wrote:@Sam: Yes, I'd love to forget the bugridden travesty that was Simon 3D. Blind-buy for me and some of the worst money I spent that year.
I bought a copy off eBay and when it arrived it was a really poor quality inkjet printed label / burned CD-R package. I complained to the seller who seemed surprised I had an issue - but he directed me to the company,
Idigicon, that was producing them because they were actually legit. Yech. Not that I've ever really played it properly, it was rushed out because the developers couldn't get anyone to front up the measly £100k required to complete the 2D version that was well under way.
Gunness wrote:As for Hitchhiker's II - thanks a bundle for the link! I had clean forgotten about that page. It's a real treasure trove for people who like to hear about the inner workings of the Infocom production team. And even Anita Sinclair - I thought she'd fallen off the face of the earth.
Yer welcome. I thought it'd go down well here with anyone who hadn't read it in a while ...
Gunness wrote:Did you ever read any of the emails in the article that were since removed? I've tried to piece some information together from the response thread, but as it is, it's a bit difficult to understand what the fuss was all about. Apart from the fact that Andy has published some mails that weren't meant for the masses to read.
I think I did - I picked up on the page fairly early on, but I can't remember any specifics. TBH, it was basically just a poor showing from Andy who seemed to have missed some of the fundamentals of good journalism. There's a difference between quoting from something said in public, to things that were clearly said in private correspondence. If I remember right, the emails contained what you'd expect from behind-the-scenes mail - various disagreements and debates over the direction of games and the company. Michael Bywater being particularly colourful. However, Andy should never have published them verbatim. He could easily have done a summation of the discussions and published that without naming names. Even the people who wrote and received those mails would be hard pushed to put them into context after all this time, I suspect, so I don't know why he chose to do that. It didn't even add much of interest really from the general public's point of view.
What I'd like to know is what Andy's done with everything else on that hard disk since. Someone must have had access to something similar to that drive, because the version numbers for
Milliways /
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe alpha builds that he released had already been recorded in Paul Doherty's
Infocom Fact Sheet when that blog post was created. I'd love to see some of the unreleased final internal versions of Infocom projects which are listed in that Fact Sheet, hit the web - I assume they're on that disk too. Like the last unreleased bug-fixed v3 version of
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 113330.
Sam.