Not presented as a comment on any of our “sides” of the argument, but this contemporary article on how Ultrasoft worked, is a really interesting read… especially for those who just dismiss these early Apple II games as being just thrown together…
An interesting comment from it, too…
I really think that “bringing a superstar writer on board and trading on his IP” is a different case from “Our game needs a writer, let’s go hire one.”
Lee Neufeld and Ronald Martinez are better examples (because I’ve never heard of them!)
Crichton is an interesting case as he’d previously written a really decent non-fiction computing book called Electronic Life. As Jimmy Maher notes, he had also contributed articles to Creative Computing… » From Congo to Amazon The Digital Antiquarian
So, on board for his skills just as much as trading on his reputation… although the reported 100,000 sales figure for the game probably reflects the latter.
Yeah, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls used a bunch of writers, both in-house and on an ad-hoc basis, with different levels of involvement with the “coding” side… Coding being Inform-style pseudo-code level stuff, rather than actual high-level engine work.
For example Rob Steggles talks about his regular involvement with Magnetic Scrolls as a staff writer here The man who turned scrolls into electronic fantasy | L'avventura è l'avventura They also used external writers such as Phil South (who’d worked on magazines such as Your Sinclair). Similarly Level 9, although games were mainly led by the Austins, later bolstered their roster with people like Pete Gerrard and Sandra Sharkey.
That’s late 1980s of course, and not Apple II. 
But it’s the way that commercial adventure games went; with people specialising as teams got bigger and games were released across more formats.
One of the things I meant to emphasize in my original post was that, Mask of the Sun and Death in the Caribbean prove that they started hiring artists for the Apple II graphic adventure game wave, but they clearly did not think of hiring writers to write the text portion on the bottom. Even though Infocom was gaining steam and market share at the same time.
Or maybe I did. Anyway, I love a healthy discussion.
Possibly because they wanted to move opposite to Infocom, instead of somebody having the thought, “combine both strengths?” Nobody seems to have thought that during the Apple II era.
LucasArts is when writer/programmers and artists finally collaborated. Possibly there’s a reason for that. I still have a beef with Mask of the Sun, Death in the Caribbean, and Kabul Spy, for having lousy game design, and puzzle randomness. A good writer hired from the professional writing pool would have quit trying to make the underlying bad game structure sound good.
Mask of the Sun had good structure, but was bad at telling the story they promised, ignored for five hours, and then pretended to conclude. Any decent author now could take the first and key later scenes and the game bones, and whip a way better interactive story into being.
I stumbled across this blog and couldn’t resist commenting. Looking through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia has a way of making things appear better than they really were! I skipped many a day of school trying to figure out my next (completely irrational and nonsensical) move in many of a text adventure game. I’m a collector and restorer of vintage computers and have tried to revisit the text adventures of my childhood on a number of old 8 bit machines. Matter of fact, I met and spent the day with Scott Adams and his wife Roxanne and had him play his own adventure on a real Apple IIe. Generally speaking, text adventures of the day were mind-numbingly atrocious, but it’s what we had at the time. I’d love to see the genre rebooted for a modern audience but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. In the thousands of adventures written at the time, I’ve only found 3 that can hold my interest for more than 5 minutes before I want to punch the old CRT I use for a monitor. Honestly, how/what were they thinking? I’m trying to recollect how we found pleasure in trying to figure out that you use the pickle with the radio to open a locked door after you flush the turkey down the toilet. Good times!
What, text adventures? I have news for you…
