Trivia / Time Zone

• Troubled Production: Based on The Digital Antiquarian's coverage of the game (1•2•3), the development of Time Zone, the sixth adventure game by On-Line Systems (later known as Sierra), was among the earliest major examples of this in the computer game industry. To make a long story short:
  • Time Zone was the latest of the Hi-Res Adventures, whose selling point was the colorful artwork accompanying every room at a time when most adventures were text-based. It was not to be just another adventure game, however; Roberta Williams, the designer, envisioned an epic adventure through time and space where the player must travel to different points in history, culminating in a climactic showdown in an alien planet of the future that would itself be bigger than any adventure game of the time.
  • To this end came the first semblance of modern "AAA" game development where instead of a few jacks-of-all-trades, it would be created by a team of people performing different specialized tasks for the game—the largest ever assembled at the time. Williams designed the game; three people translated her design into game code, with each "time zone" coded as a game in its own right; and three people handled the game's artwork, with one drawing on graph paper and two others digitally tracing the art into the game. All of this was managed by Bob Davis, who himself had just finished and shipped his own game, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, as the fifth Hi-Res Adventure.
  • Alas, Davis did not have the experience or temperament to be a manager, and almost immediately, the project devolved into a desperate attempt to figure out how to fit all the different sub-games together in time for a Christmas 1981 release. It was not until Jeff Stephenson, an experienced programmer who had last worked for the developers of VisiCalc (the first PC spreadsheet application), joined the company that the team managed to fit the whole thing together. The final result is essentially the bare minimum of Williams' vision, with each sub-game essentially stuck together with duct tape and glue.
  • Worse yet was what the lead artist had to go through. The one person who drew the art, Terry Pierce, had to draw 1,400 images for Time Zone... most of which were empty landscapes, as the Hi-Res Adventures brand dictated that every room of the tediously-oversized game grid needed its own artwork no matter how important or interesting it was. The stress of having to scribble hundreds of featureless "fields," "forests" and "city streets" on a tight schedule eventually drove Pierce into a nervous breakdown that reportedly led him to walk down a freezing highway shirtless and barefoot. Unsurprisingly, Pierce not only never worked on a game again, but never spoke to anyone at On-Line for over two decades.
  • All this, and yet there was no way the team could make the Christmas deadline. Instead, On-Line settled on a March 1982 release, at an ambitious and unheard-of price of $99.95 based on the sheer number of locations. Adjusted for inflation ($239.96 in 2012, when the blog articles were written), this makes Time Zone the most expensive single computer game ever made, and the game indeed became a flop largely because of its price tag. One of the few team members remaining afterward was Stephenson, who became the lead programmer because of his leadership, and thus eventually the head architect of the AGI and SCI engines that would power On-Line/Sierra's future and greatest hits, beginning with Williams' King's Quest two years later. Much of the rest left the industry altogether, happy not to work on another game.
  • Worst of all, however, was what happened to Bob Davis. He had a long past of alcohol and drug abuse, but had become clean by the time he worked for On-Line. Unfortunately, by the end of Time Zone's production, the money he made with Ulysses and the Golden Fleece led him to fall off the wagon big time, and soon he quit On-Line with the ambition of making his own games to sell to publishers. Alas, he could never do this without development tools to work with, even when sober... and even if he hadn't tried working with the Atari 2600, one of the most infamously difficult platforms to code for. He lost his shirt and his marriage when the royalty checks dried up, he was reduced to constantly calling On-Line to try to get hired again (or, increasingly, to try to get money), and he ultimately ended up in jail after burning bridges all over his hometown by writing one bad check after another. His downfall would taint On-Line's memories of Time Zone's production, and haunt the company for many years after.^note Fortunately, Davis' story has a happy ending: after years of training, he became the owner of TTL, an IT company in Hanford, CA.

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