I think it’s probably also very tempting to just give up on a puzzle and just find the solution or at least a hint online. You pretty much couldn’t do that back in the day.
Most of these games had hint books ("invisiclues") and selling them was a big part of the business. Some companies actually sold more hint books than the games themselves due to piracy!
Yeah but those came later. I think Mike started those in biz school and later joined Infocom where he did (ran?) marketing. Even with BBSs there just wasn’t a lot of info out there unless you called one of the authors you knew :-)
