Steve Meretzky got into games by sharing a flat. His roommate, Mike Dornbrook, was Infocom’s first and only game tester, and when Dornbrook left for business school in 1981, Marc Blank asked Meretzky to take over. He had a construction management degree from MIT and two years in the building trade behind him. Within two years he had written Planetfall and given players Floyd the robot. Within three he was in England, as he put it, practically camping on Douglas Adams’s doorstep to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy finished.
Fast facts
- Born: 1 May 1957, Yonkers, New York.
- Joined Infocom: November 1981, as a tester; became an “implementor”, Infocom’s word for a game writer, in 1982.
- Infocom games: Planetfall (1983), Sorcerer (1984), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984, with Douglas Adams), A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985), Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986), Stationfall (1987), Zork Zero (1988) and Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen (1988, with Tom Snyder Productions).
- After Infocom: the Spellcasting trilogy and Superhero League of Hoboken for Legend Entertainment; Hodj ‘n’ Podj and The Space Bar at his own Boffo Games.
From tester to implementor
Meretzky already knew several of Infocom’s founders, Blank and Joel Berez among them, through MIT’s film programme. Retro Gamer dates his arrival to November 1981, as tester on Deadline. He went on to test Zork III and Starcross, and then Blank offered him a game of his own. Electronic Games told the story in 1985: Meretzky had caught “a terminal case of ‘Boy, game design is a snap. Why, even I could do a better job in a few weeks’”, and “somehow the few weeks evolved into over a year.” He had to learn Infocom’s programming language, ZIL, while still testing half the time.
The result was Planetfall (1983), and its robot sidekick Floyd, whose death players were still asking him about twenty years later. “I wasn’t surprised that people had an emotional response; I wrote that scene to create one,” he told Retro Gamer. “But I was certainly surprised by the magnitude of the response.” The Planetfall entry tells that story. His second game, Sorcerer (1984), was the middle part of the trilogy Dave Lebling and Blank had begun with Enchanter.
He worked from story outwards. Visiting Infocom in 1988, Commodore Magazine found that where Lebling began with a map and filled it with objects, Meretzky wrote down his ideas and the storyline first, then the puzzles, and the geography last.
Working with Douglas Adams
Adams was an Infocom player, and when a game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was discussed he insisted that Infocom make it. Blank suggested Meretzky, who said it was partly timing (he had just finished Sorcerer), partly because players had found Planetfall “reminiscent of the humour of Hitchhiker’s Guide”, and partly “because I was the only implementor who was as tall as Douglas”. Computer Gaming World offered its own reasons in January 1985: Meretzky was “so unflappable and stoic and not prone to awe”.
The two worked across the Atlantic on linked DEC System 20 computers. Meretzky found Adams “the ideal dinner companion”, but as a collaborator “the world’s worst procrastinator! I had to practically camp out on his doorstep in England to get him to finish his stuff for the game.” Adams brought ideas Meretzky said he would never have had “in a million years”: a game that lies to you, a parser failure that falls through a wormhole and starts an interstellar war, an object called “no tea”. The notorious Babel fish puzzle was Adams’s idea, with refinements by Meretzky such as the cleaning robot that tidies only the upper half of the room. Infocom’s testers thought it too hard. As Adams left for the airport at the end of his last visit, Meretzky asked what he should tell them; Adams’s reply was unprintable, the puzzle stayed, and Infocom ended up selling T-shirts reading “I got the Babel fish!”
Infocom’s later years
Infocom advertised A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985) as “a radically new work of serious science fiction in which you explore the future of mankind”. Amtix called it “Infocom’s biggest game to date”, and Computer Gaming World’s Scorpia called it “ground-breaking”. It was Meretzky’s own favourite: “my largest, most serious, and most socially relevant work”, he said, which showed “that computer games could be more than an adolescent pastime”.
He swung the other way the next year with Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which ANALOG Computing described as a 1930s science-fiction spoof that sent the player “on an erotic romp through the solar system”, playable in Tame, Suggestive or Lewd modes. Its box held a scratch-and-sniff card, and Commodore Magazine reported that Meretzky had followed people round for days holding the samples, asking them to guess the smells. Stationfall (1987) brought back Floyd, and Zork Zero (1988), as Infocom bowed to changing tastes, came “packed with full-colour VGA delights, including graphical games and puzzles”, in Retro Gamer’s words. Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen, made with Tom Snyder Productions, came out the same year. He had a game about the Titanic in mind next, but Activision closed Infocom first, in 1989.
After Infocom
Meretzky moved to graphic adventures. For Legend Entertainment he wrote Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls (1990), which Computer Gaming World called “yet another bawdy, irreverent graphic adventure from Steve Meretzky”, followed by two sequels and Superhero League of Hoboken (1994), part adventure and part role-playing game. MicroProse’s Rex Nebular (1992) was originally scripted by him. In 1994 he co-founded Boffo Games with Dornbrook and Leo DaCosta; it made Hodj ‘n’ Podj (1995), which Computer Gaming World called “a potpourri of classic games”, and the comic detective game The Space Bar (1997) before closing in 1997. Boffo still could not sell the Titanic: publishers told him “no one’s interested in the Titanic”, shortly before James Cameron’s film became the highest-grossing ever made. He also wrote a design for a new Planetfall for Activision in 1993–94 that was rewritten and then dropped.
From about 2000 he designed online skill games as principal game designer at WorldWinner, and later worked on the Zoo Tycoon series at Blue Fang Games, social games at Playdom (2008–13) and mobile games at GSN Games and King. In 2022 he, Dornbrook and DaCosta revived Boffo as Boffo Intergalactic Games and re-released The Space Bar.
The original source code of his Infocom games survives. With Planetfall’s, the ZIL source of Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall and Zork Zero was published on GitHub by the Historical Source archive in 2019.
Sources
- “From Zork to Zero: The Infocom Story”, Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004, pp. 37–39: Meretzky joining in November 1981 as tester on Deadline; the founders and the MIT film society; testing Zork III and Starcross; Floyd’s death; Douglas Adams (timing, Planetfall’s humour, height, procrastination, ideas); the Babel fish and the T-shirts; A Mind Forever Voyaging as his favourite; the Titanic game and Boffo; the Planetfall design for Activision; WorldWinner; the Infocom release list.
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 4, April 1985, p. 80: Meretzky as playtester turned designer.
- “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Computer Gaming World issue 20, January 1985: why Meretzky was chosen to work with Adams.
- Visit to Infocom, Commodore Magazine, January 1988, pp. 72–73: Meretzky’s design method; the Leather Goddesses scratch-and-sniff card; Adams as co-author.
- Infocom advertisement, Compute! issue 65, October 1985: A Mind Forever Voyaging. Scorpia, Computer Gaming World issue 25, January 1986: “ground-breaking”.
- ANALOG Computing issue 46, September 1986, p. 76 and ST news: Leather Goddesses of Phobos (comedy and sex, the three modes, “an erotic romp through the solar system”).
- Amtix! issue 10, August 1986, p. 55: A Mind Forever Voyaging as “Infocom’s biggest game to date”.
- Compute! issue 105, February 1989: Zork Zero by Steve Meretzky.
- Computer Gaming World issue 76, November 1990: Spellcasting 101 preview (Legend Entertainment, $59.95); issue 98, September 1992: Rex Nebular “originally scripted by Steve Meretzky”; issue 121, August 1994: Superhero League of Hoboken; issue 130, May 1995: Hodj ‘n’ Podj.
- “Infocom Authors – Steve Meretzky”, infocom-if.org (web, secondary): birth date, Yonkers, MIT and the construction degree, Dornbrook. http://www.infocom-if.org/authors/meretzky.html
- Historical Source, repositories “sorcerer”, “hitchhikersguide”, “amfv”, “leathergoddesses”, “stationfall” and “zorkzero” on GitHub (web, secondary): the ZIL source code. https://github.com/historicalsource
- “Steve Meretzky”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Boffo Games’ founders and dates, Blue Fang, Playdom, GSN Games, King, Boffo Intergalactic Games and The Space Bar re-release in 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Meretzky