MAG.E 6/MAG.E 6 (Disk 1 of 2).adf/General/A/A

Text File | 1977-12-31 | 11KB | 230 lines

@3KEV MURPHY-AN INTERVIEW
=======================
@2
Welcome to the second of our series of exclusive MAG.E
interviews, with the people that really matter, the users. At
great expense we have acquired the services of the author of last
issue's great text adventure "Cyberpunk".

If you would like to be interviewed, then write and let me know
about yourself and I`ll see what I can do.

@3 Greetings Kev. It`s good to have you with us today.

@1  Err... Thanks (that wasn't the first question was it?)
@3
Now, we`ve all seen "Cyberpunk" and wonder how you decided to go
about it.
@1
  Cyberpunk is the text adventure, version of one of my first
short stories, even though it actually preceded the story by
about three months. Even now I cringe at some parts of it,
especially the title, which should have been "Bugs In The
System". As with most of my stories or games I just jumped in at
the beginning and hoped something recognisable would come out of
the other end. What I really wanted to do at first was to create
a part of an interactive cyberpunk town, and atmosphere was the
essential factor, hence the longer than average descriptions (and
loading time) and the different optional subplots. It was just
kinda thrown together, and I hope it worked. The plot just
surfaced as I was going.
  I realise that the actual story-line of the game is somewhat
difficult to come across at first, and I hope the solution in
this issue helps anybody who may have actually got it to run AND
played it. Any feedback is welcome, but just don't expect any new
versions to come out.

@3Have you written any other text adventures?
@1
  Yeah, stacks. I'd written a follow-up to Bugs that was called
"Shock To The System". It got finished but was erased along with
all my other stuff, see the readme file of Cyberpunk for an
explanation. Since it will never see the light of day I can say
 It was all about the hero of the first game being pursued by a
trio of ruthless assassins, sent by Alias Corp. It was more
puzzle-based than Cyberpunk, but with a handy dollop of near-
future atmos thrown in for good measure. I'm primarily a writer,
so the story, characters and descriptions will always come before
puzzles. The creation language I use, Hatrack II, is simplicity
itself, so the puzzles almost always present the least difficulty
to write.
  The only other two completed adventures I have are "Diamond Of
Dreams" (aarrgh! another casualty of my cannot-change-working-
titles problem!) which is a quite poor but puzzly fantasy
dungeon/forest bash which was the first adventure I wrote, then
the re's "Gridlock" which has only two locations but a helluva
lot of things to do. Once you figure out what to do it's quite
logical, but working out what to do is as illogical as hell.
  I'm currently working on another, a comedy, which I might
release as some kind of PD.

@3What do you use for inspiration for them?
@1
  "Diamond Of Dreams" is so cliched it require no inspiration
whatsoever, "Gridlock" came out of a summer holiday rut, and
"Cyberpunk" was inspired by the farking excellent short stories
of William Gibson. The prostitute idea and the concept of cybersp
ace both feature in "Burning Chrome", which is my second
favourite short story after "Johnny Mnemonic". Let's face it, all
fellow Gibson fans: Kandi is just a Molly Millions rip-off, Ash
is a dead version of the Finn, and Jack is a blatant Case clone.

  Sorry, mates, I'm a complete and total fraud.

@3Now onto more general things. What is your impression of Andrew
J. Campbell (last months unsuspecting interviewee) for instance?
@1
  Campbell (or "Ace" as we know him as) is a strapping seven-
footer with long dark wispy hair (on his head) and a thin beard.
He has a tendency to wearing dark clothing (he never, ever, under
any circumstances, wears Jurassic Park T-shirts), usually a torn
Hellraiser T-shirt and faded black jeans. In the winter months he
can be found wrapped in a battered gray duster that used to
belong to James Dean. His mirrorshades are a permanent fixture of
his face.
  He's the kind of guy you can depend on to get a job done,
whether it's rescuing small children from burning houses,
eliminating mad Middle-East dictators, curing cancer, or facing-
up the Fixtures & Fittings aisle at B&Q, this is the guy to call.
It i s an little known fact that ALL his stories are
autobiographical.
  The women love him. Which ones? THE women, that is, all of
them.
  Never let this dude tell you he lives in Halifax, England.
Halifax is a suburb of Los Angeles, where AJC is currently
working on a 75 million dollar blockbuster with Stephen King and
Clive Barker as his assistants directors.
  What? Oh, you mean the OTHER Andrew Campbell, sorry. Yeah,
we're good mates, I suppose (though we argue occasionally).

@3Tell us something about your upbringing.
@1
  Something? Anything? Like what? "I once buried myself in my
sandpit," is that okay?
  Something more general? Okay, I live in Darlington in a three-
bedroom semi-detached house with (in order of importance) two
felines, two rodents and three homo-sapiens, two of which claim
to be my parents. The third bears a similar DNA pattern to myself
but denies any accusation that she is my sister.
  I prefer to forget my childhood, but that's not because of
anything particularly terrible happening to me, I just seem to
remember being terribly depressed all the time, I've gotta be the
only guy in the world who, when born, snatched the scissors off
the unsuspecting midwife and tried to do himself in with them.
Fortunately, it must have been some kind of hormone imbalance or
something, as I'm okay now. An emotionally unstable adrenaline
junky, perhaps, but okay.

@3How are you involved with the Amiga scene, other than through
adventures and diskmags like this one?
@1
  I'm not. Not really, anyway. Cyberpunk was my first game that
has seen any kind of distribution. I have written and write for
several diskmags besides MAG.E, mostly fiction. I'm rather proud
to be part of The Quatermass Experiment group, a small comm unity
of sci-fi and horror writers who are stretching the genre into
the realms of Public Domain and Shareware. Electronic fiction is
definitely going to have a place in our future, and in 2050 when
all paper books are abolished (to conserve our trees ) you'll all
be fighting for shares in the TQE Corporation (Literature
Division) plc. The future of fiction is silicon, my friend, and
we have the unique opportunity to be in at the ground floor.
  Despite this, like I say, writing comes first, so I don't do
any of the collating or distribution of disks myself, but my
fiction has seen "print" in The Quatermass Experiment and Dark
Portal (and future AJC productions, I believe).
  I've also had two of my ALIENS stories published in long-gone
paper magazines and I've got a couple more that are going to see
print (in the proper sense) in the next six months. The buggers
aren't paying me for them, mind.

@3What do you particularly enjoy about the Sci-Fi content of
MAG.E?
@1
  The RD news. I'm particularly interested in following the Craig
Charles case. I'm a bit of an RD fan, see, like AJC I have every
episode on tape, and have read the novels. Not being a gullible
spotty Eric I did not take kindly to the mainstreaming of the
genre by the BBC with all those ridiculous behind the scenes
books and magazines. It just turned the whole prog into a total
and utter Andi Peters (Andi Peters symbolises everything tacky
and commercial for the neo-yuppy generation. Toby Anstis is even
worse).
  I'm also "into" Star Trek:TNG, my claim to sadness is
discovering the program through a mate's video collection and
watching about 27 hours of it in seven days.

@3And how much do you read? Does this have any influence on you?
@1
  Read? Please god don't ask me that, anything but that.
  This is a bit of a sore topic at the moment. I'm currently
under pressure to read and revise as many pieces of 'great'
literature as possible in preparation for my university entrance
exams in two weeks. In many ways it's more important than my A
Levels, as if I get an unconditional offer I could fail all four
and still get in. The problem with 'great' literature, though, is
that compared to sci-fi or horror, it's just so bloody
insignificant. Read Greg Bear's "Forge Of God", immediately
followed
 by Jane Austen's "Pride And Prejudice", like I did about a month
ago. After witnessing an alien invasion resulting in the
destruction of the planet, you couldn't really give a monkey's
whether Elizabeth Bennet marries or not! See what I mean? Sciffy
has got some kind of magnificence about it, which is why I write
it.
  Stuff I read does influence me. Especially William Gibson. I've
read all his stuff and it just blows me away so I keep coming
back for a re-read. I also like Philip K. Dick, Bruce Sterling,
Greg Bear, Douglas Adams and Allen Steele, as well as all th e
classics like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov. In the world of
'real' novels I am crazy about F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce
and Virginia Woolf. And Shakespeare, I suppose, I wouldn't be
much of an English student if I didn't like him.
  After that little lot you may think there's not a helluva lot
of writers I DON'T like. There is, but I've forgotten who they
are.

@3What we all want to know about is your popularity. How do you
adapt to stardom?
@1
  Stardom? Excuse me? If somebody kisses my butt like that they
usually want something.

@3And have you had any embarrassing moments caused by it?
@1
  God, I feel like I'm on "Going Live" or something. Who do I
look like, Jason Donovan?
  By the way, if I say "*******" will you censor it like you did
in my Cyberpunk readme file?

@3Finally tell us all about your vision of the future. We`ll let
you know if it lives up to it.
@1
  What do you mean "We'll let you know"? I intend to be around to
see it myself. Unless you know something I don't of course...
  What I reckon is, basically, take William Gibson's cyberpunk
universe, and get rid of all the space stuff, and you've got a
pretty realistic prophecy. It's the old "deranged experiment in
social Darwinism" quote time again, used in that MAG.E review
last issue, and more importantly by Bruce Sterling in the
introduction to the Burning Chrome short story collection.
Technology is just going to get out of the hands of the
establishment and hit the streets big time.
  Although the books never actually mention any dates, I'd figure
most of the tech in them for about 2030, give or take, but
there's no way they'll be cities and castle's like Straylight in
orbit by then, with long-established aristocracies living there,
so I reckon Mr Gibson missed the target a bit with that. But if
you take his picture of a post-war Earth among the lowlifes of
the innercities, then you've hit the nail pretty much on the
head. A lot of his stuff depended on there still being a USSR,
mind, so some aspects would have to be changed.
  If I may quote an anonymous sci-fi author here, "The future is
going to be dark, so grab what you can and run with it."

@3 Thanks for that then Kev. Some interesting comments there.
@1  Where?

@3Cheers, mate!
@1  No problem...