Gold Machine

Infocom goes to (development) hell.

Bureaucracy (1987)

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Opening Crawl

Important!

Our records show that you do not have a licence to operate this software.

Normally, you would be required to complete a Licence Application Form and mail it (with proof ofpurchase) to our Licensing Department, and then wait the customary four to six weeks for processing.

Luckily, for your convenience, we have, at the last minute and at great expense, installed a remarkablenew on-line electronic application form on this verydisk, which will be processed by our modern 24-hour computer service moments after you fill it in.

[Press any key to begin.]

[Your blood pressure just went up.]

You have been granted Licence Number 870602.

Thank you for your cooperation, Ms D. Have a nice day.

Well now, Ms D, aren’t you glad you left your previous job? The Deep Thought Corporation of America was of course a great company to work for, except for the no-coloured-socks dress code, and you really enjoyed being Vice President (Software Development), especially the opportunities it gave you to cause considerable inconvenience to many hundreds of thousands ofpeople you had never met.

But Happitec is going to be much more fun. The money’s better, it’s a great place to live and work and you’re really looking forward to your Paris vacation.

You’re pretty pleased with your new home, too, and don’t really mind that the removals company fouled up slightly due to a computer scheduling problem. After all, you won’t be using your new place for the next two weeks, and they promised to have everything installed by the time you return.

In fact, the only tiny cloud on the horizon is a silly bit of bother with your bank about a change-of-address card. You know the sort of thing? You send them a change-of-address card, and they say “Oh dearie me, that’s not our official change-of-address form, the computer won’t like it a bit, you’ll have to fill in a proper one, we’ll send one to you,” and they do, but they send it to your old address along with your new US Excess card and your cheque book...?

Of course you know the sort of thing. It’s exactly what has happened to you. But Happitec’s enlightened employee policies mean you don’t really care. After all, who needs money? Pick up your Happitec cheque, grab a bite of lunch, a cab to the airport and then you’ll be living high on the hog at Happitec’s expense. What a truly enviable situation you find yourself in, Ms D.

BUREAUCRACY
A Paranoid Fantasy
Copyright (C) 1987 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Bureaucracy is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Interpreter 1 Version C
Release 116 / Licence Number 870602

Front Room

This is the living room of your new house, a pretty nice room, actually. At least, it will be when all your stuff has arrived as the removals company said they would have done yesterday and now say they will do while you’re on vacation. At the moment, however, it’s a bit dull. Plain white, no carpets, no curtains, no furniture. A room to go bughouse in, really. Another room is visible to the west, and a closed front door leads outside.

Twelve and Counting

Making a game about impersonal corporate and governmental waste must have seemed a very Infocom thing to do. Zork had its Flatheads, and Planetfall‘s Stellar Patrol seemed to run on red tape. The social critiques leveled by those texts, we can surely all admit, were toothless and apolitical. Voters happily throwing money at Reagan’s Star Wars antiballistic program, as an easy example, did not feel personally attacked by jokes about the Frobozz Volcano Construction company, even if the two institutions had the exact same amount of nothing to offer their taxpaying citizens.

That isn’t to say that Infocom didn’t have a great deal to say about 1980’s America. It absolutely did, as we’ve maintained here all along, but it said many of those things because all texts must, in the end, say something. There were exceptions, of course, as A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity can attest, but those would prove to be singular works of courage that were both commercial failures in their time.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of Infocom’s bestselling games, indicated a third way, buoyed as it was by Douglas Adams’s good-natured humanism. If I had not written so much else besides, I might have made some observations regarding the bright vapidity of the Nutri-Matic or the Heart of Gold‘s artificial intelligence. Adams’s lampooning of corporate euphemisms, public relations speak, and computation-precipitated stupidity were both timely and prescient. It is not so hard to imagine chatGPT anthropomorphized as 20 Nutri-Matics in a trenchcoat.

Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a massive success, and the company must have been delighted at the prospect of another Adams game. Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of The Universe was already a twinkle in the board’s eye, presumably, but Adams had another idea, inspired by a very relatable and human experience with his bank, which would not, no matter how he tried, acknowledge his change in address. What if a game could be made of such a fiasco?

This must have been a novel idea in those days. Hadn’t modernists like Faulkner and Joyce elevated everyday human experiences, granting them sprawling and epic grandeur? Why couldn’t a computer game do what they had done? Thus germinated Bureaucracy, an idea that was entirely Adams and, it must be said, rather groundbreaking for its day. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had trod some of this ground. One town’s planning commission is another planet’s Vogon fleet, after all! What would it be like to stage a surreal, hilarious conflict with various financial and governmental institutions as a game?

The construction of Bureaucracy is a long and meandering yarn that I cannot do justice here. I encourage you to read Jimmy Maher’s accounting, which is filled with twists, turns, and, rather memorably, Brian Moriarty’s characterization of Douglas Adams as “lazy.” This is the closest that Infocom has come to what the discourse now refers to as “development hell,” a seemingly intractable period of non-production that threatens to leave a work permanently unfinished. Steve Meretzky, we know, had trouble getting time from Adams, and perhaps completion of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy must have sometimes seemed in jeopardy, but Bureaucracy was by comparison the real thing. It took years for it to ship, which must have seemed a lifetime at a studio with such dwindling prospects.

Would the Real Author of Bureaucracy Please Stand Up?

Although it might feel oddly estranged from Infocom’s production practices, Bureaucracy was touched by several implementers, and is credited to “Douglas Adams and the Staff of Infocom.” The packaging makes light of this unusual situation by inventing a fictional author meant to represent them all:

Original Implementer W. E. B. “Fred” Morgan was dragged out of an early retirement (spent developing new strains of Scotch) to collaborate on Bureaucracy. A prolific hacker, Fred worked on ZIL, the implementation language for Infocom games; Muddle, the implementation language for ZIL; and Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Enchanter, Deadline, Wishbringer, Ballyhoo, Trinity, Cutthroats, and the sampler. Fred also helped develop Infocom’s database manager, Cornerstone. After Bureaucracy, Fred plans to re-retire, and begin work on a hooked rug, roughly the size of Delaware, representing the Great Underground Empire.

As funny as this all is, it masks the truth: it was Michael Bywater, British humorist, broadcaster, and capable harpsichordist, who pushed Bureaucracy over the finish line. I do not believe we can quantify how much of this frankengame should be attributed to him directly, but the record suggests that it would have been finished by Bywater or else by nobody at all. Some critics–perhaps not intentionally–have implied that we are left with Bywater as a consolation prize or “off-brand” Adams, and that’s really an unkindness I’d like to resist. Whatever the merits might be, Michael Bywater was a creative in his own right with a distinctive voice and not simply “somebody other than Douglas Adams or Steve Meretzky.”

Perhaps a lack of authorial clarity–it is hard to say who exactly wrote which specific parts–has engendered a dearth of critical enthusiasm. Even though Bureaucracy has many fans today, it is one of Infocom’s least remarked-upon works. It has, like Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, Border Zone, Sherlock, and Journey, garnered only one review at the Interactive Fiction Database. By the time it released in 1987, three years after the blockbuster success of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, audience responses were similarly muted. Then and now, few have known what to make of this strange game.

I, perhaps unwisely, will try to make something of it! It is not, mechanically, a favorite of mine, but its interest in gamifying contemporary life is innovative and forward-looking. Bureaucracy is, even if we might need help remembering it, an important game that tried a new thing worth trying.

Next: Saving the Queen and Other Mistakes

Coverage continues with a look at the text and paratext of Infocom’s Bureaucracy.