But I think what made our games different, one of the things, is that we had this language [Sierra’s Adventure Game Interpreter] that no one else had. And we had tool makers who built tools for us to use. When I tell people that we made all those games before Photoshop, they just look at me like, “How old are you?” and I say, “Before there was paper, children!” The language was a real advantage to us because we could create sound effects, we could create music, we could edit text easily, we could write games a scene at a time and compile them within seconds and be immediately back in the game testing it.
We called each scene a “room,” mostly because we didn’t know what we were doing, and there was no precedent. We just ended up with words like that because somebody had said, “Oh I think that’s a room. We’ll call that a room.” And making each room, I got to the point where my setup was so efficient that rather than pick up a pencil and write down notes I would just go in and write code or add a joke, compile it with one keystroke, then exit the editor and go right back into the room again, and it would take me 10-15 seconds to make the trip. Those “round trips” were so easy and cheap that you took them all the time. That’s why the games were so fleshed out, because we’d made so many iterations.