Steve Meretzky

Personal

Born May 1, 1957, in Yonkers, NY; married Betty Rock, 1986; children: Dan, Sasha. Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S., 1979.

Addresses

Home—Boston, MA. Office—WorldWinner, Inc., 275 Grove St., Newton, MA 02466. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Infocom, Cambridge, MA, software tester, game designer, 1981-89; Legend Entertainment, freelance games designer, 1990-94; Boffo Games, cofounder, computer game designer, 1994-97; Game FX, computer game designer, 1999; WorldWinner.com (online gaming portal), Newton, MA, principal game designer, 2000-.

Member

Science Fiction Writers of America, Post Mortem.

Awards, Honors

Platinum certification, Software Publishers Association, for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Editors' Choice Award, PC Gamer, 1997, for The Space Bar; named among twenty-five "Game Gods," PC Gamer, 1999; British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for Internet version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 2005.

Writings

COMPUTER GAMES

Planetfall, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1983.

Sorcerer, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1984.

(With Douglas Adams) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1984.

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1985.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1986.

Stationfall, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, Legend Entertainment (VA), 1990.

Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance, Legend Entertainment (VA), 1991.

Spellcasting 301: Spring Break, Legend Entertainment (VA), 1992.

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, Microprose Software, 1992.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X, Infocom (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

Superhero League for Hoboken, Legend Entertainment (VA), 1994.

Hodj 'n' Podj, Virgin Interactive (Irvine, CA), 1995.

(With Ron Cobb) The Space Bar, SegaSoft (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

(With others) Sinistar Unleashed, THQ, Inc. (Calabasas Hills, CA), 1999.

OTHER

(As S. Eric Meretzky) Zork 1: Forces of Krill ("Choose Your Own Adventure" novel), Tor Books (New York, NY), 1983.

(As S. Eric Meretzky) Zork 2: Malifestro Quest ("Choose Your Own Adventure" novel), Tor Books (New York, NY), 1983.

(As S. Eric Meretzky) Zork 3: The Cavern of Doom ("Choose Your Own Adventure" novel), Tor Books (New York, NY), 1983.

(As S. Eric Meretzky) Zork 4: Conquest at Quendor ("Choose Your Own Adventure" novel), Tor Books (New York, NY), 1983.

Steve Meretzky's Spellcasting 301: Spring Break: The Official Hint Book from Legend Entertainment Company, Compute Books (Greensboro, NC), 1993.

Sidelights

Steve Meretzky helped pioneer computer game design. As part of the Infocom group in the 1980s, he wrote such popular text-only interactive adventure games as Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (with the book's author, Douglas Adams), A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall, and Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz. When Infocom folded in 1989, Meretzky moved on to freelance for various game producers, writing the popular "Spellcasting" series of games and his final adventure game, The Space Bar. Meretzky's work was noted for its rich detail and humor, a blend of Monty Python and Woody Allen zaniness with a Mad magazine sensibility. Unlike most others in the pioneering years of computer game design, Meretzky was not trained in computers, but in construction management. Nonetheless, he was, during his college years, a self-confessed computer nerd. As he noted in a profile for Computer Game Review, "There are definitely gray scales of nerditude, and there are much harder core nerds that I have known in my life, but definitely I had some components of nerditude."

The Making of a Nerd

Meretzky was born in 1957, in Yonkers, New York, where he was raised. Growing up, he was a science fiction fan, reading the books of Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, and Orson Scott Card. He was also a fan of the television show Star Trek, as well as movies of all sorts. For humor, he preferred Mad magazine, the early Saturday Night Live shows, and the cartoons of Gary Larson. Board games also were an early passion for Meretzky, who once joked in PC Gamer that "we were too poor to afford a cradle, so I was bedded in an old Monopoly box."

In 1975, Meretzky entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he proposed to study architecture. Instructors, however, convinced him that his real talents lay in construction management. He eventually earned a degree in that field, and worked in construction in the Boston area for two years. Meanwhile, his roommate at the time, Mike Dornbrook, was a tester at a new computer games business called Infocom. Basically the testing for such games as Zork I and Zork II took place on an Apple II computer on Meretzky's dining room table. Soon Meretzky too was playing these games, reporting mistakes or bugs in the system not as a paid tester but simply as an avid computer games player. He finally left the construction work, which he found he did not like, and when Dornbrook had to leave for business school in Chicago, Infocom offered Meretzky a job as tester.

"Getting into games was like digging into chocolate cake after a few years of eating nothing but brussel[s] sprouts," Meretzky told Philip Jong in an interview for AdventureCollective.com. Infocom at the time was the cutting edge in computer games, focusing on interactive adventures, then the most popular type of computer game around. The company, the brainchild of MIT graduates such as Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, had developed its own multi-word parser called ZIL, which in turn was based on a computer language, MDL, that the founders had created for MIT's computer science lab. ZIL allowed gamers to use complex instructions in their games instead of the simple verb-noun commands found in other games. Infocom produced text-only games and developed a compression technique for file size. This was an invaluable technology for the early 1980s, allowing its games to be played on a wide assortment of home computers. The first production of the company, Zork I, released in 1979, sold over a million copies. Its follow up, Zork II, was equally successful. Thus, by the time Meretzky joined Infocom, prospects were good for the company.

Infocom Glory Days

After a year as a tester, Meretzky moved over to the writing side of things, becoming one of the band of Infocom Implementers (a programmer's term for writing a program), or "Imps," as they were called. His first production was the 1983 Planetfall, which set the tone for most of Meretzky's work: an extremely difficult puzzle wrapped in a humorous narrative. A lowly ensign on a Stellar Patrol must escape an explosion aboard his starship, and then, after crash landing on a nearby planet, he must, with the help of a sidekick robot named Floyd, solve a puzzle on the deserted planet in order to get back home. Writing in AdventureCollective.com, John Alston Campbell noted, "The game's greatest strength is the plot. Although relatively simple in itself, it is developed with control that rivals a novel." Meretzky's writing ability was a trademark of his work. Meretzky and fellow Infocom Imp Dave Lebling, in fact, would be the first two writers of interactive fiction ever admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Meretzky's next game, Sorcerer, turns from science fiction to fantasy, as a young apprentice Enchanter must defeat the evil warlock Krill and figure out what has happened to his mentor, Belboz, in order to save his realm. Meretzky's breakout title came next, written with author Douglas Adams. Their game, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was an adaptation of Adams's book of the same title, which became a tremendously popular series on British radio and television.

The game, like the book and its sequels, follows the misadventures of one Arthur Dent, whose home and planet are destroyed to make way for an interstellar freeway. Dent stumbles about the galaxy accompanied by Ford Prefect, Trillian, Zaphod Beebblebrox, Marvin, and a host of other rather zany characters created by Adams. As Meretzky noted, the beginning of the ensuing game adaptation follows the books very closely, but soon the game takes off on its own. "Later," Meretzky explained to BBC 4 interviewer M. J. Simpson, "as Douglas [Adams] became more comfortable working in a non-linear medium, and as I became more comfortable making my opinions known, the game became much stronger. I think that once you arrive at the Heart of Gold, the structure of the game changes for the better, becoming less linear, more original, fairer to the player and just plain more fun." Working under tight deadlines, Meretzky was also plagued by Adams's legendary procrastination. The game, however, did come out in time for the Christmas season of 1984 and proved a success, with puzzles such as "Babel Fish" that were so difficult to solve that they have become cult classics in gaming. It was also the first text adventure that told lies to its players, one of the sardonic innovations of Adams.

Tackles Big Issues

Meretzky next turned to more meaningful issues with the game A Mind Forever Voyaging, his "largest, most serious, and most socially relevant work," as Meretzky told Jong. This is unlike other Infocom games in that it is story-heavy. There is only one puzzle, near the end of the story. Meretzky's tale posits a United States in 2031 with a failing economy and on the verge of becoming a police state. For Meretzky, A Mind Forever Voyaging, though not one of his bestselling titles, is one of his most significant. "I feel it showed that computer games could be more than an adolescent pastime, but could instead be used to explore Big Issues."

Meretzky returned to the wacky and somewhat naughty side with the 1986 Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which began life as a joke title. The player must escape the clutches of the Leather Goddesses before they invade planet Earth. Science fiction adventure is at the heart of Stationfall, set thousands of years in the future and reprising some of the characters from Meretzky's first title, Planetfall. In 1988 Meretzky penned a prequel to the popular Zork titles with his Zork Zero, taking the reader/player back to the age of the Great Underground Empire of the Flatheads.

By this time, however, Infocom was on its last legs. After diversifying into unsuccessful business software, the company had been taken over by Activision and new leadership proceeded to gut the functions of Infocom. By 1989 the company was gone, though some titles continued to be published under its imprint in the 1990s.

Life after Infocom

Meretzky stayed with Infocom until the end, then spent several years freelancing. Some of his most important works in the early 1990s were three hu-morous and sometimes racy titles in the "Spellcasting" series for Legend Entertainment, as well as Superhero League of Hoboken, for the same publishers. This was a combination of adventure and role-playing games set in post-apocalyptic New Jersey in which Meretzky assembles a quirky team of superheroes to battle against the powers of darkness.

Meretzky teamed up with some former Infocom friends to found Boffo Games in 1994, although the production company was plagued from the start with publishing contracts that fell through. His two creations from this time are Hodj 'n' Podj, a hodgepodge of mini-games united by a board-game quest, and The Space Bar, another of Meretzky's humorous science fiction adventures. This one was several years in the writing, and Meretzky had great hopes for it, as it combines 3-D artwork and music with his usual strong story line. When published in 1997, the game received a host of positive reviews. Allen Rausch, writing in PC Gamer, found that it is "fresh, funny, and well constructed from both a technical and gameplay aspect." People contributor Samantha Miller observed that it was "refreshing to find a sci-fi game that doesn't take itself too seriously—and a comedy CD-ROM that's genuinely funny."

If you enjoy the works of Steve Meretzky

If you enjoy the works of Steve Meretzky, you may also want to check out the following:

The work of computer game designers such as Jon Freeman, creator of Archon, Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, and Roberta Williams, creator of King's Quest.

Unfortunately, despite his high hopes and the game's good reviews, as Meretzky told Jong, The Space Bar "sold like bat guano." In fact, adventure gaming had passed its time. Younger gamers were moving on to more action-oriented and graphics-heavy games. Interactive adventure games require a huge number of possible responses and scenarios, better and more economically handled by text than with graphics. Meretzky's career had been devoted to the depth of the interactive medium rather than the more surface enjoyment of action games. Boffo Games closed its doors in 1997 and Meretzky thereafter worked on other titles, but has not produced an original work since.

In 2000, Meretzky became a game designer for the online competitive gaming site, WorldWinner.com. Players pay a fee to enter skill-based tournaments and winners get a cash prize. The games are smaller and take generally a month to design. However, such games have "zero story" as Meretzky told Gil Alexander Shif in CDmag.com. Meretzky allows that interactive stories will not make a comeback unless there is some new technological breakthrough, such as voice recognition, so that typing long responses will no longer be necessary. Meanwhile, Meretzky continues to conjecture on the nature of the perfect game. "It needs to be fun," he told Jong. "If it's too hard, or too easy, or too repetitive, or if the interactive comes too infrequently, or if the puzzles are unfair—well, those all just boil down to the fact that the game … won't be fun." In 1999, in recognition of his contributions, PC Gamer named Meretzky among the twenty-five "Game Gods" in the history of computer gaming.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Computer Entertainment, May, 1985, Charles Ardai, "Zork: The Interactive Novels," pp. 75-76.

Computer Game Review, April, 1996, "The Imps of Infocom Are Still Alive and Kicking," pp. 83-88.

Game Developer, April, 2002, Steve Meretzky, "Boston Post Mortem," p. S11.

New York Times, January 29, 1995, John Patrick, "State Is Home Turf for Superheroes of Comic Book and Software," p. NJ13.

PC Gamer, October, 1997, Allen Rausch, review of The Space Bar; September, 1999, "Game Gods: Steve Meretzky," pp. 80-81.

People, June 30, 1997, Samantha Miller, review of The Space Bar.

ONLINE

AdventureCollective.com, http://www.adventurecollective.com/ (May 3, 2001), Philip Jon, "Interview: Steve Meretzky"; (August 21, 2001), John Alston Campbell, review of Planetfall.

L'avventura e l'avventura, http://www.avventurestuali.com/ (May, 2001), "Interview with Steve Meretzky."

BBC Radio 4 Online, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ (April 15, 2005), M. J. Simpson, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Interview with Steve Meretzky, Co-Author of the Game."

Boffo Games Web site, http://www.boffo.com/ (April 15, 2005), "Steve Meretzky."

CDmag.com, http://www.cdmag.com/ (September 28, 2000), James Fudge, "Steve Meretzky Joins WorldWinner.com"; (November 23, 2000), Gil Alexander Shif, "Steve Meretzky."

Infocom, http://www.infocom-if.org/ (April 15, 2005), "Infocom Authors: Steve Meretzky."

Infocomicon, http://www.egotron.com/ (April 15, 2005), "Steve Meretzky."

MobyGames.com, http://www.mobygames.com/ (April 15, 2005), "Steve Meretzky."

WorldWithoutBorders.com, http://www.worldwithoutborders.com/ (April 15, 2005), "Game Zone Transcripts: Steve Meretzky."

XYZZYnews.com, http://www.xyzzynews.com/ (April 15, 2005), Matt Newsome, "XYZZYnews Talks to the Bearded Oracle of Yonkers."