(Inaccurate) Memories Of Memories - A Conversation With Michael Bywater (page 5)

I know a number of people who were a little disappointed with the ending of "Jinxter". Personally I thought it was brilliant and the only way to go. Looking back, what do you think about it?
You know, I can't remember how it ended at all and I don't have any of the material to hand. I think that probably the great majority of the actual text was my stuff though I may be entirely mistaken. As I said, it was over twenty years ago. Sorry.

Well, at the beginning of the game you are about to get run over by a tremendously big bus and are saved by a Guardian, who then sends you off on your quest. After completing your adventure the ending puts you right back in front of the aforementioned bus - this time with no one to save you. Full circle, so to speak.
It's all coming back to me. Yes. Full circle. I was thinking of two things, one a story by Jorge Luis Borges and the other, the very ancient tale of the Appointment at Samara. You can't flee your fate but you can do something useful before it gets to you. So it wasn't an original idea but then I don't really think there are any original ideas, only different versions of a few age-old ideas.

Do you remember how much time you had available for the rewrite of Jinxter? I think Anita (Sinclair) mentioned somewhere it was only a few weeks ...
It was damned tight, I do recall. A few weeks - three or four perhaps. But you go into a strange time-dilation world under those circumstances. In my memory it varies between a day and forever. It was quite intense but very rewarding.

Well, you must have gotten quite the crash-course in learning the intricacies of the Magnetic Scrolls adventure system. How hard was it, especially for a non-programmer, to "get the hang" of the system and how long did it take to actually be able to work productively with it?
We didn't have time for that and I'd not have been able to manage it, I know. I wouldn't have just had to learn their system, but learn to think like a coder. Everyone was hunkered down in the Magnetic Scrolls offices just working away. I'd write text interactions, then mysterious things would happen with Anita and the chaps, and the VAX would hum away compiling stuff, and we'd play through it and if it seemed to work, we'd forge on. I was just the words guy. The others did the hard work.

There seems to be some confusion over who did what on "Jinxter", as the game credits do not list any individuals names. Can you shed a little bit of light on the issue?
It all got a bit complex but I think credits are in there somewhere. Probably an easter egg but damned if I know the key. My most powerful memory of the process was Anita purloining my fancy Toshiba "laptop" and me having to work on a VAX terminal which I hated. But she was at the time both the boss and my honeypie, so I didn't complain.

Did you actually have any influence on the pictures in "Jinxter"?
No.

But you did see the pictures from the Atari ST/Amiga versions?
Yes. Brilliant. They offered better resolution and colour depth and really both machines were rather ahead of their time -- perhaps that was why they never made it into the mainstream but remained "toy" computers. The "business" market, if you like, has always been terribly conservative and suspicious of anything different or, worse, better. That's why they still plod on through the ugly and clumsy Windows. I find it incomprehensible but that's beside the point.