David Fox (LucasArts) interview

Aventura y Cia has published an interview with David Fox, formerly of LucasArts, discussing his work on such classics as Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken.

After ‘Rescue on Fractalus!’ in 1984, you continued your career in Lucasfilm and created an adventure game that did not strictly follow the standards back then. You could see the character in third person like in Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest, but it was controlled by menus, which pretty much simplified its interface. Back in those years, struggling to make the most comfortable interface must have been to the order of the day, but time has passed and interfaces have been much enhanced. Do you think they can still be improved or is it a waste of time to drop one’s efforts into this matter?

We felt that too many of the puzzles in the Sierra adventures (like King’s Quest) relied on acquiring skills with steering your character around the screen. Likewise, we didn’t want a game that was mostly "guess the parser" - trying to figure out what words the programmer was thinking of when he created the game. Neither process was fun, and they took you out of the game experience. So our attempts with a "slot machine" interface in Labyrinth was a first try to simplify coming up with the commands, and keep the player in the game.