Re: Marketing, was Re: C


7 Dec 1995 05:00:53 GMT

In article <30C5D93F.4F7B@cis.compuserve.com> Ivan Cockrum <ivanc@cis.compuserve.com> writes:
>The first necessary step would have been/is to downplay the "game"
>aspects of IF, and broadly advertise the "literature" aspects. The
>second step (this is more applicable today, because of course
>Infocom already had national distribution) would have been/is to get
>these "interactive novels" or "hyperliterature" or whatever
>marketing term people agree on, into book stores, supermarkets, etc.
>at a low price (not more than the price of a paperback novel), and
>in an obvious, accessible format (a hybrid Mac/PC floppy disk placed
>in racks by the checkout with no additional packaging).

How about this idea... With all of these cheapo spell-checkers,
computerized bibles, organizers, etc. selling for under $50, what about
making a dedicated thing using the same hardware but different ROMs?
I'm sure some of those things have more powerful computers in them than
some of the old 8-bit machines that ran infocom games. You could
probably charge $40 or so and include 5 games. I seem to remember
someone saying that some of those spell-checkers/etc have 6502 CPUs
and a system similar to the old Apple II, with the only difference
between the different models is the ROMs. You might even be able to
do something like a spell-checker, a scrabble dictionary, and a
few IF games.

Greg

-- 
Videogames, Unicycling, and Anarchism: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/