Missed Classic 87: Hollywood Hijinx (1987) - Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

At the dawn of 1987, Infocom wasn’t the company that it once was. A scrappy gaggle of cutting-edge game developers had grown too large, made some bad choices, and was struggling to survive. The new bosses at Activision wanted to profit off their investment and since Infocom games weren’t selling like in the good old days, they just asked Infocom to make more of them-- with the same resources-- to make up for it. Simple, right? The result was a year that was their most prolific as well as the nadir of their commercial success. Even as commercialism failed them, 1987 will see innovations such as the first romance game (Plundered Hearts), the first horror game (Lurking Horror), the first weird wordplay game (Nord and Bert), plus reinventing what a Zork game could be. None of those were commercially successful, but I haven’t played more than a few minutes of any to say how good they really were. At least Infocom was still out there doing interesting things.

That brings us to Hollywood Hijinx, the first of this mad rush of games. Developed by a new pair of Implementors, Dave Anderson and Liz Cyr-Jones, the game appears to be a throwback to the Zork games of yesteryear, with a “puzzle house” to explore and treasures to collect. For reasons that may (or may not) become apparent later, this is Anderson and Cyr-Jones’s only released game. How will it work out? I’ll have to play it to see.

“Hollywood” Anderson in the late 00s. 

Working in software QA is not easy. Having run small quality departments in the past, I can say with some authority that the work is much harder than it might seem, requires a deeper understanding of software than you might expect, and-- especially in the earlier days of software development-- required a lot of drudgery and iterative work. Nailing down a memory leak or reproducing a minimum test case for a bug can be exceedingly difficult, but absolutely required so that the software engineers on the team can work efficiently. In poorly run companies, the relationship between development and QA can be filled with animosity-- as if the discovery of your bug was somehow their fault-- but at a well-run company, QA and DEV are two peas in a pod, working together to deliver great software for our customers.

I like to think that Infocom fell in the latter category, although perhaps in the future we can learn more. By 1987, Infocom had developed a reputation already for giving QA team members opportunities to step up and design their own games. Steve Meretzky started as a tester and his games have been consistently among the best that Infocom ever produced! (Only Brian Moriarty has given him a run for that title.) Jeffrey O'Neill, another tester, created Ballyhoo. In this time of trouble for Infocom, three more will step up: David Anderson, Liz Cyr-Jones, and Amy Briggs. We’ll look at Ms. Briggs when we investigate Plundered Hearts in a few months, but for Anderson and Cyr-Jones, Hollywood Hijinx was their time to shine.

Hollywood Hijinx is primarily credited to David “Hollywood” Anderson. He studied biology at the University of California, but fell in love with computers and joined Infocom in 1983 as a tester. By 1985, he had been promoted to manage the testing group. Anderson was a larger-than-life person at Infocom and much of the zany culture that we attribute to the company in its heyday can be attributed, at least in part, to Anderson’s influence. The Digital Antiquarian goes into many of his stories, but suffice it to say that Anderson was put on trial (and exonerated) for killing the office park goldfish, raced hermit crabs, and even managed Infocom’s team in a local softball league. Anderson was-- and presumably still is-- a fun guy. His only other official credit comes as the QA manager on Wishbringer, but it is likely that most of the games in the Infocom canon owe him a great debt due either to his own testing or that of his team. But can finding the problems in others’ games translate to making a great game of his own?

Liz Cyr-Jones is credited for the “original concept” of this game, a hair that Infocom had not split since 1983’s The Witness. (In that case, Stu Galley implemented his game based on an outline by Marc Blank and David Lebling.) Cyr-Jones is credited for games beginning with 1985’s Wishbringer where she was a member of Anderson’s testing team. Although she gets a nice credit blurb in the manual, she was not considered an “official” implementor and so Amy Briggs has the regretful distinction of being the only woman to helm a game at Infocom. She remained at the company through to nearly the end and is last credited for testing Arthur.

The Manual & Feelies

The packaging for Hollywood Hijinx consists of a “special memorial issue” of Tinsel World, a fake Hollywood gossip magazine, our Aunt Hilda’s will, a photo of Uncle Buddy Burbank with a letter on the back, and a swizzle stick. The plot, as it is described in the manual seems simple enough:

As a child, you spent most of your summers with your Aunt Hildegarde and Uncle Buddy. What memories! Uncle Buddy was a Hollywood big-shot, Aunt Hildegarde his loving (and very rich) wife. They had no children of their own, but you and your cousins loved their house, their parties, the Hollywood memorabilia, and them. Sure, Buddy and Hildy were a bit eccentric-but that added to their charm.

Aunt Hildegarde kept the house when Uncle Buddy passed away. And now that she's suddenly died, you remember her unusual will. You will inherit the entire estate- probably worth millions-if you can spend just one night in the house and on the grounds, and find a treasure or two. But if you can't, then you inherit nothing.

Looking over the will, we get a bit more of the detail of the situation. It seems that our character was always their favorite and Aunt Hilda and Uncle Buddy wanted us to have the estate when they passed on. Now that Aunt Hilda has also passed away, it’s time for me to claim my prize… if I work for it. Hidden around the grounds are ten “treasures” (their quotation marks!), all souvenirs from Uncle Buddy’s career as a B-filmmaker. All I have to do is find them all in one night and the house is mine; failing to do so means that another one of the nieces and nephews will be given the chance instead. Somewhat strange, Aunt Hilda’s will also includes a photo and letter from Uncle Buddy. Why wouldn’t I have been given the letter when he died (years ago) rather than now? His letter consists of something vaguely like poetry, listing off some of his films, and motivating me to be like some of the characters in his oeuvre. If there is a clue here, I don’t see it. I did get to use “oeuvre” in a sentence, so that is a win.

The enclosed Tinsel World magazine is odd, but mostly fun. At thirteen pages, it goes on long enough that I barely want to read the whole thing… but I do because otherwise I might miss a clue. It seems strange however that the magazine would print a “memorial issue” to Buddy Burbank after his wife died. I suppose she was the last connection to him, and really all these magazines want to do is to push copies, but it comes off as a bit crass to talk nearly exclusively about her husband after her death.

If we ignore the articles about the three-headed boy, the killer gerbil, and the baldness cure, we are left with a handful that look vaguely pertinent. Aunt Hilda and Uncle Buddy met in 1948-- she was a wealthy but bored socialite and he was an actor that dreamed of owning his own studio. Buddy and Hilda worked out a plan to crack open her trust fund by getting married; this allowed her to access her family’s money early and the pair agreed to run the studio together. They produced low-budget B-movies in the 1960s, switched to “Buck Palace, the fighting letter carrier” movies in the 1970s, and presumably was still cracking out the films until Buddy’s passing a few years ago. The rest of the pertinent information appears to just be speculation as to which of the nieces and nephews would be the one to inherit the estate, plus details on several of the films in Buddy’s 600-film catalog. I do my best to skim through it all, but I really hope I won’t need to answer trivia about movies that don’t exit.

Now that I’ve made it through the manual, the only thing left is to actually play the game!

The Game

We begin just outside Aunt Hilda’s estate with instructions from the lawyer that we must find all ten treasures by 9 AM the following morning. I hope I got a nap, but I am more worried about the time limit. He leaves immediately and we are free to explore the grounds. I am reassured that the game refers to itself as a “zany treasure hunt”; I like the tone that it sets already. I’m ready to play a game I don’t need to take too seriously.

We start just south of the house, next to a statue of an actor pointing a bazooka north towards the front door. The statue is of “Buck Palace”, of the actors that was mentioned in the manual. He’s the lead in a series of movies about a militant mailman. I liked a little blurb about him in the manual enough to reproduce it here:

By now, everyone knows how Buck got to be such a big star. He was just a run-of-the-mill mailman with a penchant for law and order when he lucked into the Burbank Studio route. One day, Bud Burbank saw Buck outside the studio, wielding his bazooka to make traffic toe the line so an old lady could cross the street. Well, as they say, the rest is history. Bud signed Buck for a million-dollar contract and the guy became a star.

It’s a cute detail that he was a bazooka-wielding mailman before he became a B-movie star! I discover that I can turn to point the bazooka in any direction, but with no reason to do this right now I keep looking.

Marching up to the front door seems like the best approach, but doing so doesn’t accomplish much. The house is locked tight. I can search the mailbox to find a copy of Infocom’s Status Line newsletter (having recently been renamed from The New Zork Times), as well as a yellowed piece of paper and a business card for a computer repairman. The paper appears to be ASCII art of some kind, but I cannot read or understand it. We’ll need to explore around the house to find our way in.

I do love some of the flavor text that is thrown around. For example, here’s a nice little note while we ascend the walkway:

As you walk towards the house, a large black cat scurries across the path, heading towards Johnny Carson’s house.

It’s a little thing, but it works. The doorbell on the house was “once rung by Sonny Tufts”. It helps to sell the mood that the game is trying to set. I also like that they are using real Hollywood names and not just the made up ones from the manual. Johnny Carson needs no introduction (he was still the host of the Tonight Show in 1987), but Sonny Tufts is a much deeper cut. He was an actor famous in the 1940s, and long dead by the time this game came around.

I circle the house, but there isn’t a ton to see. The building itself is set at the south end of a large property. There’s a patio with a backdoor, but it is also locked. (We do find an orange-colored punch card on the ground there, a hint at puzzles to come.) Just behind the house is a four-room flower garden arranged in a diamond with a stand of trees in the middle. We apparently puked on a rose bush in our youth, an event with the game insists on relaying. We find a shovel in the garden, which I also pick up. Behind the garden is the entrance to a large hedge maze; I am intimidated almost immediately and resolve to map it later.

Only when we get to the back of the property do things get a little more interesting. The northeast corner has a path leading down to a beach, but the stairs are broken leaving a gap that we can almost jump across. (Doing so causes the remaining stairs to collapse, dropping us to our doom below.) If we circle north around the hedge maze, we discover a Civil War cannon emplacement-- apparently a prop from a different film-- but it seems to be functional. A stack of fake cannonballs reveals one real one and the fuse looks like we can light it. Will we have to shoot at something? Even further north is a steep downward slope followed by a mysterious hatch. There’s a ladder beside the hatch, but no way in and no way to carry the heavy ladder back up the slope.

And that’s it. There is no hint anywhere as to how to enter the house. Since the only place I didn’t check is the maze, I hold my breath and map the whole thing.

Whew! That was pointless. 

Mapping it turns out to be easy. Unlike a traditional “cave maze” where directions are inconsistent and you need to map every exit in every location, this maze has nice square rows and the text tells you exactly how many feet you move each time. With that, it’s easy-- but time consuming-- to take some graph paper and map out every turn and intersection. I managed to do it all in 50 minutes, but I wish it was time well spent since I find absolutely nothing there. I had hoped there would be a center room with some puzzle, like in the Greek myth, but all we have is more maze. Why would anyone bother? At 185 rooms, it is by far Infocom’s largest maze, but so far also its most disappointing.

I still do not know how to get into the house.

While I’m desperately searching, I play through things again and notice more of the connections. I like how we are given little stories of our childhood as we explore the grounds. The diversions are well-written and help to flesh out both our character and the history of the space. It is also a good reminder that, unlike Zork, we are exploring a space that we are supposed to already be familiar with.

For example, we get two nice stories about the rose bush as we explore in different places. Will it be significant later?

Standing here, you remember the time at one of their parties when you swiped one of Uncle Buddy’s big Hollywood cigars and smoked it, then got sick on a rose bush in the garden. You snicker a little bit thinking about that poor rose bush now and the goofy things you did as a child.

And:

You're standing on a stone walkway in Aunt Hildegarde's much envied garden where she would spend hours tending to her flowers, bushes and trees. The garden was off limits to you as a child because of an incident one summer when you and Cousin Herman were playing in the garden. You suggested pretending to be wild African animals and climbed a tree and began to screech as if a baboon while Cousin Herman ran off toward the roses shouting something about being a rhinoceros.

After howling until your throat felt like you had puffed on one of Uncle Buddy's Hollywood cigars, you went to find Cousin Herman. When you arrived you couldn't believe your eyes -- Cousin Herman had pulled all the thorns off of all of Aunt Hildegarde's rose bushes in a quest to find the biggest thorn possible so he could be a rhino. Of course when Aunt Hildegarde saw her naked rose bushes, Cousin Herman blamed it all on you. The walkway leads south, northeast and northwest.

The double reference to Uncle Buddy’s cigars are also fun and suggest that perhaps we may stumble on a cache of them before the game is through. Even if we don’t, I am being charmed by the descriptions. While you were distracted by my stopping to smell the roses, so to speak, I worked out that the answer was in front of me the whole time.

The letter on the back of Uncle Buddy’s autograph.

As mentioned earlier, the “feelies” this time around not only included the gossip magazine, but also a copy of Aunt Hildegard’s will and a note from her long deceased husband. Apparently, he wanted me to have a shot at the house even then. Reading the note carefully, I realized that three of the films that he mentions in his poem contain directions: “Fastest Blender in the West”, “Cannibal Buffet of the East”, and “Vampire Penguins of the North”. If we turn the bazooka-man west, east, and then north, the front door unlocks and we can get inside! Although simple enough when we have the letter in front of us, I had forgotten those details by the time I sat down to play the game. At least I buy that a house like this could have such a code: it’s like a flamboyant garage password and those were all the rage in fancy houses of the 1980s.

As we enter the house for the first time, we hear footsteps in another room. We are not alone. That’s creepy.

The house is a fairly large space and there are many “puzzles” that are just right out in the open. My first task is just to get the lay of the land without spending too much time trying to solve anything. I just want to know what is out there. Rather than dictate my explorations room by room, let me summarize it for you:

First Floor

• Foyer - This is where we came in. An odd coat closet is just to the south with three coat hooks on the wall, plus a rusty bucket hanging from one of them. There’s also a pair of skis in the closet.
• Living Room - The living room is dominated by a giant fireplace with three wax figurines on the mantle. I at first suspect they are Oscars, but they are actually Hindu gods. In addition to their different colors, they are also holding up 3, 5, and 7 fingers respectively. 
• Hallway - East of the foyer is a hallway dominated by paintings. If we remove one, we find a safe and a green punch card. That is the second colored card I found. What are they used for?
• Parlor - East of that is the Parlor where Buddy would entertain guests. For some reason, all the furniture, except a piano, is bolted to the floor. The piano seems significant, but I will have to come back later. 
• Game Room - North of the foyer is a game room containing an amazing scale model of Tokyo from the film “Atomic Chihuahuas from Hell”. There are lots of buttons to press and I look forward to pressing them all soon. 
• Dining Room & Kitchen - West of the game room are a dining room and kitchen, both devoid of obvious puzzles. I pick up a book of matches from the kitchen and a piece of paper with ASCII art on it (nearly matching the one outside) from the dining room. 
• Screening and Projector Rooms - The far northeast of the house consists of a mini-theater. There are mens’ and womens’ restrooms, a screening area, and a projector room. There are two projectors in the room, one film projector (with a small loop of film) and a slide projector. I also locate a yellow punch card. 

Upstairs 

• The main path upstairs is blocked: the stairs turn into a slippery ramp if I try to climb up. However I can climb up through the fireplace in the living room to access the roof. That lets me enter another, blocked off, fireplace where I discover a stuffed penguin. It’s one of the props from “Vampire Penguins of the North”! Since our score increased by 10, I believe I have the first treasure! Nine more to go.

Cellar

• Cellar - Under the kitchen, the cellar is dominated by an old-fashioned computer with punch card slots. I guess I know where the colored cards will go!
• “Closet” - The “closet” in the basement is actually an elevator shaft. The blue card is hidden inside, but it must mean that there is more to the upstairs coat closet than meets the eye.

And that is it! There are so many puzzles to unpack, I hardly know where to begin. It has been a while since I felt like I had so many things that I could try to tackle first. It seems nice, but could become overwhelming if I don’t manage to crack some of them soon.

The very first puzzle that I work on involves the two pieces of paper with the strange ASCII art. When I put them together, they form a single image:

Very similar to my map, but with gaps removed somehow.

Knowing that X marks the spot, I grab my shovel and march into the maze. It’s a long path, even when you have mapped it all, and it takes 20+ moves to get there. When I arrive, I dig in the dirt and quickly discover a Buck Palace stamp and am awarded with 10 more points!

With eight more "treasures" to go, and a long walk back out of the maze, this is where I will end this week. Thus far, my initial impressions are better than I expected, but there’s not a ton of plot here. We’ll see how I feel as the game progresses. 

Time played: 1 hr 50 min
Inventory: flashlight, matchbox (containing a match), shovel, copy of the Status Line, business card, Aunt Hildegarde’s letter, photo of Uncle Buddy, brick, stuffed penguin, red statuette, white statuette, blue statuette, and several punch cards (blue, yellow, orange, green, and indigo).
Score: 20

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Now it is time to guess the score! As this is both Anderson and Cyr-Jones’s first games, they have no history with which to judge. Infocom’s overall average remains 40 points with soaring highs (53 points for Trinity) and disappointing lows (30 for Moonmist). Which side will this strange game fall on? I look forward to finding out.

Let’s Vote! I have a choice ahead of me and I’d like your help in making a decision. I’d like you to vote on which game I will work on next. The truth is that I enjoy writing most when I am working on things you want to read, so asking you to vote is a bit self-serving. Please forgive me! Anyone that votes will get CAPs so please do not let anything get in the way of expressing your opinion. Here are the three options:

• Space Quest V (1993) - The next main-line game I am supposed to review. It’s the first game in the series designed solely by a single “Guy from Andromeda”, Mark Crowe. I’ll have to get to this eventually or Ilmari will shoot me.
• Bureaucracy (1987) - The next game up in the Infocom Marathon, plus the second and final game to feature input from Douglas Adams.
• Portal (1986) - An “interactive novel” by Rob Swigart. It’s one of a small handful of interactive fiction games that Activision published outside of Infocom during this period and likely their most experimental.

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introductory post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.