Fool Me Twice

摘要

Cliff Johnson has a cold. "I haven't worked in a week," the sniffling 55-year-old confesses over the phone from his home in Bristol, Connecticut. You can almost hear gamers groan in unison. Johnson is the cult hero of PC puzzle gaming, and his feverish fans need him at his keyboard. For the past six years, he's been slaving away at coding a new title, The Fool and His Money. He has no publisher or financial backer; his funding comes from friends and what he calls "true believers"-scores of players willing to preorder a $40 game that's been "almost finished" since 2005. What could possibly inspire such loyalty and trust (especially given the cautionary title of the project)? Enduring adoration for the mae-stro's mind-bending 1987 creation, The Fool's Errand. Johnson got into game design while monkeying around on a Mac 512K in the mid-1980s. "It's an ideal medium to stage an illustrated storybook of puzzles," he says. He constructed a series of simple tableaus about a character called the Fool. To help the Fool on his quest, players had to crack scores of devious brain-teasers, culminating in a metapuzzle that linked them all. "You had to earn the story," Johnson says.