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Dear _________

Thank you for your comments about "The Witness."

We designed "The Witness" to complement "Deadline" in many ways:

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It copies the action tradition of Raymond Chandler stories instead of the
drawing-room tradition of Agatha Christie.

The setting is a winter night on the west coast instead of a summer
day on the east. The house and cast of characters are small instead of large.

The story is a (possible) suicide that looks like murder instead
of a murder that looks like suicide.  The detective is involved from the
very beginning, in fact necessary for the crime, instead of wrapping up
the case after standard police investigation.

Finally, we wanted to reach a much wider audience with "The Witness,"
so we made the English analyzer more friendly, the writing more vivid,
and the plot simpler, without bottlenecks on which players would get stuck.
(Just imagine how many calls we get from people stuck on the hidden closet
or the missing teacup in "Deadline"!)
We could have made the case more difficult just by making clues more
difficult to find;
in fact an early revision of the game had commands called "harder" and
"easier" that made clues more or less obscure, but we weren't sure
whether we could invest enough time to do that right.

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You are one of the few people who told us that you thought the mystery
was too easy. Perhaps you found it so because of your outstanding skill
as a detective or game player. Perhaps you are the kind of loyal customer
who buys every new Infocom product, expecting it to provide countless hours
of pleasant frustration. If so, perhaps the three new products that we're
planning for release this autumn will suit you better. They are "Planetfall,"
a light-hearted SF story; "Enchanter I," a magical fantasy in the tradition
of Zork; and "Infidel," our first realistic "Tale of Adventure."

In any case, thank you for your comments. It's good to know that people
care enough about our games to take the time to write.

Yours,

Stu Galley
