Planetfall opens with the player scrubbing a deck. You are an Ensign Seventh Class in the Stellar Patrol, two tours in and going nowhere, and your diary, which comes in the box, complains about the bullying Ensign First Class Blather. Then the ship explodes, an escape pod drops you on a deserted planet, and in an empty complex you meet a small robot called Floyd. Floyd wants to play hide and seek. He chatters, follows you about and gets in the way, and by the end of the game a great many players found they cared about him more than they had expected to. Steve Meretzky, who wrote it as his first game for Infocom, said later that he wrote the scene that made them feel it on purpose.
Fast facts
- Publisher and developer: Infocom, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Author: Steve Meretzky, his first game.
- Released: August 1983, according to Retro Gamer’s list of Infocom releases, at $49.95 in the US.
- Machines: the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, the Commodore 64, the IBM PC, TRS-80 Models I and III, the TI Professional and the PDP-11, all running Infocom’s Z-machine.
- In the box: a diary, postcards, a Stellar Patrol ID card and the manual.
- Sequel: Stationfall (1987).
From tester to author
Meretzky came to Infocom as a game tester. He told Retro Gamer in 2004 that he took the job over from Mike Dornbrook, Infocom’s first tester, and tested Deadline, Zork III and Starcross before Marc Blank offered him the chance to become an “implementor”, Infocom’s word for a game writer. Electronic Games told the story with more mischief in 1985: Meretzky had suffered from “a terminal case of ‘Boy, game design is a snap. Why, even I could do a better job in a few weeks’”, and Infocom gave him the chance. “Somehow the few weeks evolved into over a year.”
The start was slow, Meretzky said, because he had to learn a new programming language, ZIL, and was still spending about half his time testing. He began writing in September 1982, and the game “didn’t really start coming together until perhaps early spring of ’83”.
The game
The pod lands on Resida, a planet of two islands, both apparently deserted. The player has two problems at once: staying alive, by finding food before the emergency rations run out and somewhere safe to sleep, and finding a way off the planet. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer counted more than 100 rooms across two huge abandoned complexes, Kalamontee and Lawanda, and liked the descriptions enough to want to know why the place was empty and where all the people had gone. The puzzles involved access cards, tools and broken machines, and he found them “logical with just enough depth to give me problems but not enough to cause me aggravation”. The player could fall ill, and dreamed while asleep.
TRS-80 Microcomputer News enjoyed the world-building, from the Patrol’s motto, “Boldly Going Where Angels Fear to Tread”, to the confiscated equipment for the Ensigns Seventh Class Double Fanucci Tournament, and quoted a description of a machine-shop dispenser with buttons labelled “KUULINTS” and “KATALISTS”, “BAAS” and “ASID”.
Floyd
Floyd was the game’s invention. Computer Gaming World‘s reviewer found him a nuisance at first “because of his incessant babbling”, then caught himself slowing down in rooms he had already mapped so that Floyd could keep up. “Floyd’s interaction is a very unique concept in this game. It adds animation to the game without relying on graphics.” In Britain, Computer & Video Games’ Paul Coppi described a robot who “refuses to grow up and act like an adult robot — he prefers playing hide and seek and writing on walls to doing any actual work”, and added that “you will not complete this Adventure without him”.
Electronic Games in 1985 called Planetfall the first adventure game to be billed by its makers as humorous, and described Floyd as “a childlike, hypersensitive robot sidekick” who “even gets tears in his eyes when his feelings are hurt”. The same magazine asked a month later, “Who can forget Floyd’s tragic death?” Meretzky was asked about it twenty years on. “I wasn’t surprised that people had an emotional response; I wrote that scene to create one. But I was certainly surprised by the magnitude of the response. And by the fact that people are still asking about it, 20 years later!”
Electronic Games said Planetfall “earned Infocom a whole shelf full of Best Game awards”. It also led to Meretzky’s best-known collaboration: when Douglas Adams wanted Infocom to adapt The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Blank suggested Meretzky, partly, Meretzky said, “because many people had found Planetfall to be reminiscent of the humour of Hitchhiker’s Guide”.
Later history
Floyd came back in Stationfall (June 1987), Meretzky’s sequel. The player, promoted to Lieutenant First Class, sets out on a routine errand to collect a supply of Stellar Patrol forms, with Floyd once more for company; 8000 Plus called it “an excellent sci-fi adventure which seems to merge the best of 2001 with the best of Star Trek”. Infocom reissued Planetfall in its Solid Gold range in July 1988, alongside Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
The game’s source code survives. In April 2019 Planetfall was among the Infocom games whose ZIL source was published on GitHub by the Historical Source archive, as material for “education, discussion, and historical work”; the repository says it is not under an open licence.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 13, November 1983, p. 47: hint for Planetfall; p. 44, Scorpia’s Enchanter review comparing its difficulty.
- Computer Gaming World issue 15, March 1984, pp. 43–44: “Micro Reviews”, Planetfall (author, $49.95, the story, Kalamontee and Lawanda, more than 100 rooms, Floyd, the puzzles, the package).
- TRS-80 Microcomputer News vol. 6 no. 6, June 1984, p. 6: review (the diary, Blather, Resida, the machine shop).
- Paul Coppi, review of Planetfall, Computer & Video Games issue 35, September 1984, p. 114 (Floyd; the ID card and postcards; the list of machines).
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 3, March 1985, p. 66: Planetfall as the first adventure billed as humorous; Floyd.
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 4, April 1985, p. 80: Meretzky as playtester turned designer; “Floyd’s tragic death”; awards.
- 8000 Plus issue 15, December 1987, p. 53: Stationfall review (sequel to Planetfall; the forms; the Lieutenant First Class badge). Amazing Computing vol. 2 no. 8, August 1987, p. 56: “Thrilling sequel to Planetfall”. AC’s Guide to the Commodore Amiga, Fall 1990, p. 133: meeting “your old buddy Floyd” in Stationfall.
- “From Zork to Zero: The Infocom Story”, Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004, pp. 37–39: interview with Steve Meretzky (becoming a tester and an implementor; ZIL; the dates of writing; Floyd’s death; Douglas Adams); Infocom release list (Planetfall, August 1983; Stationfall, June 1987; Solid Gold reissue, July 1988).
- Historical Source, “planetfall” repository on GitHub, published 14–16 April 2019 (web, secondary): ZIL source and its licence statement. https://github.com/historicalsource/planetfall