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>LOOK
THE RECORDER'S OFFICE
An interactive night in the county records
by Mickey Walker
[ about the game ] [ transcript ] [ hints ] [ how I built it ]
It is a Friday night in March, 1962. You are a title searcher, and you have done a stupid thing: you sat down in the back of the county deed vault at a quarter to five to check one last entry, and you woke up at nine-forty in the dark. The building is locked. The night janitor has his radio on and can't hear you knock.
That might not matter, except that at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, on the courthouse steps across the square, the Colquitt farm is going to be sold at auction. Old Walter Colquitt has farmed it for fifty-one years. A land man named John Morrow says Walter never had clear title, because the deed that gave it to him in 1911 isn't in the county's books. You came here to find it.
You have all night. You have a building full of paper. Somebody has been here before you.
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>WHAT IS THIS?
The Recorder's Office is a text adventure, which some people now call interactive fiction. There are no pictures. The game describes where you are, and you type what you want to do, in plain English: READ THE INDEX, OPEN THE DESK DRAWER, ASK THE JANITOR ABOUT THE RADIO. The game answers. If you grew up on Zork, you know the drill. If you didn't, you're in for something.
It's a mystery with a clock on it. Twenty-three locations, about a hundred and forty things to look at, and five or six puzzles, none of them unfair (I hope) and none of them requiring you to read my mind (I tried). There's no way to die. There is one way to get locked out of winning, and the game warns you before you do it. Most people take three to five hours.
It's my first finished game. I'm 24, I test software for a living in Seattle, and I wrote it on evenings and weekends over about eighteen months, in TADS 2.
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>HOW DO I PLAY IT?
1. The game is a single file called RECORDER.GAM, about 190K. It's on the Interactive Fiction Archive, the big FTP site in Germany (ftp.gmd.de), in the TADS games directory. Release 2 is the one you want; it fixes most of what Release 1 got wrong.
2. You need a free TADS interpreter to run it. That's a little program that reads TADS game files, the way a word processor reads documents. There are versions for DOS, Windows, the Macintosh, Amiga, and a lot of Unix machines. If you're on Windows 95 or 98, get HTML TADS. They're all on the Archive, in the TADS directory, with instructions.
3. Open the game file with the interpreter, read the first screen, and type something. LOOK and EXAMINE (or just X) are your best friends. INVENTORY (or I) shows what you're carrying. SAVE early and often. Directions are N, S, E, W, UP, DOWN.
4. Talk to people with ASK [person] ABOUT [thing], TELL [person] ABOUT [thing], and SHOW [thing] TO [person]. There's only one person awake in the building, so it won't get crowded.
5. Stuck? There are no hints inside the game. They're on the hints page, hidden until you want them.
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>WHY A RECORDER'S OFFICE?
My grandfather was a title abstractor in eastern Washington for forty years. When I was a kid he'd take me to the county records building on Saturdays, and I'd sit on the floor of the vault while he ran a chain of title through books that were older than he was. It was the quietest place I've ever been, and the most exciting, because every book had a thousand people in it, buying and selling and marrying and dying, and he could follow one family through all of them like a bloodhound.
My older brother Kevin, meanwhile, had a Commodore 64 and a shoebox of Infocom games. Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect were his favorites, the mysteries, and he let me play them if I didn't save over his games. I saved over his games. I'm still sorry, Kevin.
Somewhere in there these two things got stuck together in my head, and eighteen months ago they finally came out.
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>WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING?
I put Release 1 up in March and Release 2 in May, and posted a note on rec.games.int-fiction, and people were very kind. Several wrote to say they'd played it all the way through, which is more than I ever did with Suspect. One person said the deed vault was the most convincing room she'd walked into in a game in years. One person said the janitor reminded him of his dad. One person found a way to put the deed book inside itself, which I fixed in Release 2, and which I think about a lot.
If you play it, I'd love to hear from you, even if it's to tell me about a bug. Especially if it's to tell me about a bug. Bugs are my day job.
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>WHAT'S NEXT?
I've entered something in this fall's annual Interactive Fiction Competition. The rules say authors aren't supposed to talk about their entries while the judging is open, so that's all I'm going to say until the votes are counted in November. Don't ask. (Okay, you can ask. I just won't answer.)
If you're new to all this and want to know what else is out there, Gwen Cagle's West of House: An Infocom Shelf is a lovely page: her shelf of boxed Infocom games, gentle hints for the famous puzzles, and a whole page on the new interactive fiction people are writing now. She explains the competition better than I can.
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Last updated September 17, 1999
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