There are twelve games left to cover at Gold Machine, and the next is Bureaucracy, a title that went through a very troubled development. The concept is definitely Douglas Adams’s, but it is hard to say how much he contributed beyond that. Many persons at Infocom worked on it over a period of three years, and, for a time, it must have seemed that it would never see the light of day.
I post these here because I enjoy Infocom discussion, and I know a lot of you do, too. There’s no need to discuss the essay specifically, so feel free to comment on the game, Adams, Bywater, or whatever else might seem relevant (though of course discussing the essay is welcome, too).
My only trivial addition (and this is indeed trivia) is that “Fred” was the name of the office PDP-10. So the list of what “Fred worked on” is literally accurate, except for the retirement and the Scotch.
(If “W. E. B. Morgan” is an additional gag, I don’t get that one.)
One of my abiding memories is how much he loathed book signings.
I don’t remember what book Adams was promoting at the time, but I attended a signing he did at Forbidden Planet in NYC and brought my copy of Infocom’s HHGttG to have signed. He looked upon it with a foul expression that I could only interpret to mean, “Really? This?”, but he signed it without comment.
