                                        June 17, 1988


Joel Berez
President
Infocom, Inc.
125 Cambridge Park Drive
Cambridge, MA  02140

Dear Joel:

     Enclosed is the proposed outline of our third game.  The
game currently has no title, but it is to be a parody of the
movie "The Wizard of Oz."  The goal is to produce a hilarious and
wacky, off-the-wall comedy.

	The underpinnings of the game rely on the same principle as
the other games in the "Immortal Legends" series.  It deals with
a character who is already firmly established in the popular
mind, who comes complete with an already-identified supporting
cast, and whose actions take place in an evocative environment.

	The subject matter is delicate in that the treatment must be
wacky enough to be genuinely enjoyable, but not so satirical or
biting that it creates a negative reaction.  I think that your
people have good radar in this area, and that our relationship
with them is close enough to keep the game on the right track.

	I look forward to hearing your reactions as soon as
possible.

                                        Sincerely yours,



                                        Robert A. Bates
                                        President

cc:  Jon Palace
     Mike Dornbrook
     Stu Galley 


                Program Description - Program III
                                 
                                OZ
                                 
Plot Notes

	The game opens with the player, Dorothy, on her farm in
Kansas.  Dorothy's daily routine is dull, tedious and degrading. 
Every five moves or so, the game hauls her away from whatever she
is doing to muck out the horse stall, shovel the droppings out of
the goat pen, scrub the floor of the chicken coop, or clean out
the privy.

	Needless to say, Dorothy is eager to get away from all
this.  So eager, in fact, that for the rest of the game, a
"jigs-up" results not in death, but a fate worse than death - a
return to her odiferous duties at the farm.

	Dorothy leaves the farm and comes across Professor Marvel. 
He offers her various snake-oil products, and one in particular
catches her eye.  He sees this and touts it to her, saying, "What
do you do when you've got to go to school but there's a test you
haven't studied for?  It's no use hoping for a snow storm.  Why,
what you need is 'Tornado-in-a-Bottle.'  Just open up this little
fella and you'll have a Texas twister faster than you can say
atmospheric disturbance.  But when you open the bottle, be
careful where you stand.  I guarantee that as soon as you release
it, that tornado will head right for the nearest mobile home
park."

	Dorothy buys the bottle, Toto bites Marvel on the ankle, and
the enraged professor chases them back to her house where she
opens the bottle.  The ensuing tornado whisks her and Toto off to
Oz.  Dorothy has to steer the house as it falls so that it lands
on the Wicked Witch of the East.  But the Oz they land in is
different from the one we are used to.  It is more like Southern
California - sort of Oz-gone-commercial.  You can buy Oz-burgers
and Oz-dogs at fast-food stands; bumper stickers say "I (heart)
Oz" and "Honk if you like Glinda."  The Munchkins talk in
Valley-girl-speak, fer sure.

	Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, floats in on a bubble
and says, "Now that you have killed the Wicked Witch of the East,
the only evil person left in Oz is the Wicked Witch of the West.
Of course, there is the Fairly Bad Witch of the
North-by-northwest, but she's getting old and doesn't amount to
much."

	Glinda keeps the ruby slippers for herself, giving Dorothy
instead the striped socks that the dead witch was wearing. 
"Don't take them off," Glinda says.  "The longer you wear them,
the more powerful they will become."

	Then Glinda says that although Dorothy has done everyone a
good service by dropping a house on the wicked witch, still, she
did break the law in doing so.  She's guilty not only of
witch-slaughter, but of flying without a pilot's license,
littering, and re-locating a residential structure without filing
an environmental impact study.

	Glinda thinks about a punishment for Dorothy.  She considers
making her play a year in the Munchkin NBA, or locking her in a
small room with an Oz-way distributor. But she finally decides
that only the Wizard of Oz can choose the appropriate punishment,
so she selects a "trial date" and says that Dorothy must appear
before Oz by then.  If Dorothy fails to get to the Emerald City
by the appointed time, she gets sent back to Kansas.

	Once Glinda has pronounced sentence she says, "I'm sorry, I
have to go now.  The next bubble is coming, and if I miss it
there won't be another one along for 2 hours.  Service has gotten
so poor since the budget cuts."  She floats out of sight.

	When Dorothy starts off down the yellow brick road, she
quickly comes to a crossroads.  The direction she chooses
determines which of her companions she will meet first.  (This
should help reduce some of the linearity of the game)

	Each of the people she comes to decides to join her in her
journey.  Each of them wants something from the wizard.  The
possibilities for the scarecrow include:
	1)  He's tired of being unable to do his job because he has
no brains, and so what he wants is a new job that doesn't require
brains - such as politician, clerk at the department of motor
vehicles, or senior executive at a large corporation.
	2)  He's afraid the farmers will get mad at him for not
being able to scare away the crows, and so what he wants is
liability insurance (which, being a con man, Oz will be only too
happy to sell him).

	When Dorothy finds the tin man, she also has to find the oil
can and oil him down.  Once she does this she discovers that
either:
 	1) He thinks of himself as a walking lightning rod, and what
he really wants are rubber galoshes for insulation.
	2) He wants to be Ziebarted (rust-proofed).

	The lion could
	1) Be an effeminate character whose burning desire in life
is to get a species-change operation.  "Inside me there is a
gentle lamb just waiting to get out.  A few hours on the table,
and a couple weeks in the Bahamas, and I'll be a new creature."
	2) Be a hypochondriac who is afraid that eating raw meat
every day is too unhealthy.  What he wants from the wizard is
either a barbecue grill, 10 hours of psycho-analysis to get over
his fears, or a good diet program.

	The four of them (five, counting Toto) start off for Oz. 
Along the way, they have to survive the poppy field, deal with
the flying monkeys, gain entrance to the castle of the Wicked
Witch of the West, and kill her.

	Once they have killed the witch, they gain entrance to
Emerald City and have their audience with Oz.  They discover the
wizard is a fraud.  The wizard gives each of Dorothy's companions
some totally useless object that he claims will solve each of
their problems.  He then sneaks off without helping Dorothy at
all.  Glinda floats in on the 7:28 bubble and says that Dorothy
could have used her socks all along to get what she wanted. 
(How, I'm not yet sure, because I'm not yet sure what will
represent success for Dorothy.)  Dorothy follows Glinda's
instructions and wins the game.


Alternative Possibilities
                                 
The following are a couple of even more off-the-wall ideas, which
may be worth incorporating into the above story, or developing on
their own.

                      LEATHER GODDESS OF OZ
                                 
Essentially the same story as above, but with more suggestive
language, racier insinuations, and a sub-stratum of sex running
throughout.  We could substitute a whip for the striped socks and
dress Dorothy in leather.


                          ASSAULT ON OZ
                                 
Dorothy arrives in Oz and learns either that
	1) The wicked witch is holding the wizard captive or,
	2) The wizard is a drug kingpin (he controls the poppy
fields) who is a tyrannical despot and who has enslaved the
inhabitants of Emerald City.

In either case, Dorothy assembles her swat team.  The tin man is
a hopeless-romantic ex-mercenary, like Rick in Casablanca.  He
handles infiltration and reconnaissance. The scarecrow is a
Marxist radical intellectual who is also an expert in
communications. The lion is a wild-eyed extremist who specializes
in explosives & demolitions.

In the course of this action-packed adventure game, they collect
the various items they need to assault the fortress, including
plastic explosives, blasting caps, a grappling hook, gun, radio,
etc.

The game culminates with the storming of the fortress and either
the release of the wizard, (scenario 1) or his downfall (scenario
2).

                       MOVIE WITHIN A GAME
                                 
The game would as described in the main proposal.  But at some
point soon after Dorothy gets to Oz, the player learns that the
people in the game - including Dorothy - have a dual reality.
They are not only characters within the story, but also actors
playing those characters.

This could be used sparingly - just a few scattered complaints
about how hot the make-up is under the lights, for example - or
we could make the whole game a dual-level experience, with 
separate puzzles for each level and a final victory that cannot
be achieved unless all the puzzles in both levels have been
completed.

This approach has some very practical uses.

1)  	Default winner handlers:

	Wicked Witch of the West: "Forget it, kid.  I just get paid
     to laugh maniacally and give you a hard time."

	Auntie Em and Uncle Henry:  "I'm sorry, honey.  We do love
     you, but they made us such bland, boring characters that we
     can't do anything but say we love you."

2)	Responding to reasonable inputs that the author doesn't want
     to handle:

	The Director yells, "Cut!  Dorry...Baby. We can't have you
     doing that, OK honey?  I know the script calls for you to
     improvise, but L.B. would go nuts over the figures if we
     tried to include everything in the budget.  So be a doll,
     OK?  Stick to what's reasonable."

3)	Limiting the amount of "game damage" that can be done with
     certain objects.  If a player acquires a certain object in
     the game and decides to return to a previous location to try
     to use it, then the Director can yell,
     
	"Cut!  Look, honey.  We've already struck that set.  I know
     no one told you, but we're trying to save a few bucks, OK? 
     Look at it this way: on the one hand, you can't go back. 
     But on the other hand, you don't need to.  So whaddya say. 
     Let's go with the flow.  Roll 'em!"

4)	The Director can also be used as the hint giver.

	"Well, kid. We really want you to improvise.  But we are
     over budget and behind schedule, so I guess it wouldn't hurt
     to give you a little push in the right direction."

     
If we pursue this option, the Director would inform Dorothy at
the beginning that he wants her to improvise the script as she
goes along.  We need to have him encourage improvisation so that
the player doesn't get the sense that there is only one way to do
things.

If the two-level game is rejected as too complicated, it still
might be interesting at the end of a one-level game to have a
Director yell, "Cut!  That's a wrap.  Good job, people.  The
movie will hit the theaters in six months."
