Douglas Adams
Dave Anderson
Bob Bates
Michael Berlyn
Marc Blank
Amy Briggs
Liz Cyr-Jones
Patricia Fogleman
Stu Galley
Jim Lawrence
David Lebling
Steve Meretzky
Brian Moriarty
Jeff O'Neill
Jerry Wolper
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Steve Meretzky wrote Planetfall (1983), Sorcerer (1984), The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (with Douglas Adams in 1985), Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986), Stationfall (1987), and Zork Zero (1988). "In some sense starting Boffo Games has been at least a partial restoration of what things were like in those days, although, I don't think for me or any of the other people who were at Infocom will there be anything like it. I mean, we were all pretty young and everything was going so well. The industry was brand new and the sky seemed like the limit and all our games were bestsellers and it was such a great time..." While Meretzky enjoys his current job he says "nothing will match the excitement and the fun of Infocom in its heyday." Looking back, Meretzky suggests that perhaps he and his fellow Implementors should have gotten into graphics sooner, but he believes the getting into the business software side of the industry was "a huge mistake." While gaming was Infocom's core, there were those who wanted to make business software. The result was a productivity title called Cornerstone. This was an expensive product to produce and it did not sell well. As a result, Infocom had to take the profits made from the games to support their business products and that ultimately helped suck the financial life out of Infocom. After working in the construction industry for two years -"...those are definitely not years that I look back on with any joy (laughs)"- Meretzky joined Infocom as a tester in November 1981 and became a full-time writer in June 1983, scripting Planetfall. During this time at MIT Meretzky says he was, to some extent, a computer nerd. "There are definitely gray scales of nerditute, and there are much hardercore nerds that I have known in my life, but definitely I had some components of nerditute." As with many writers/game designers, deciding on which of their works is their favorite isn't easy. For Meretzky, Planetfall holds a special place because it was his first and he very much likes the character of Floyd, who has become the de facto cult icon for Infocomphiles. He says he also cherishes working with Douglas Adams on The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It is the Leather Goddesses of Phobos which has the most interesting story conception. "At the time Leather Goddesses came out, computer games were so incredibly pure and straightlaced. Although, looking at it now it seems pretty tame, at the time it really pushed the envelope a lot." Meretzky says the game came about as an afterthought to a running joke at Infocom. He wrote the name on the project board as a joke, but later was asked to develop the game and use that name. But it was A Mind Forever Voyaging which allowed Meretzky to address social issues in a heady game environment. He also suggests that Zork Zero, released in 1988 near Infocom's total demise as a company, was the epitome of text adventure games. Like most of the other Imps, Meretzky believe that the lasting value of the text games is that "...they really have so much more depth than games have nowadays and [it is] really easy to see why. You can do things in text so much more quickly, easily and cheaply than with graphics...or any visual method of showing the same thing. And therefore the games could be so much deeper and have so many more options and possibilities than games have nowadays." The major downside in terms of game play, of course, is that using a text parser requires that the player be willing to type in all of his or her answers. There is little time for Meretzky to reminisce. His Boffo Games is designing Spacebar for Rocket Science, a game that he describes as a "detective game/comedy". (Courtesy www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom.) Steve Meretzky was born and raised in Yonkers, NY, in 1957. In the summer of 1975 he started studying at the M.I.T. and left with a degree in Construction Management. For two years he worked in the construction industry, but he soon felt an uncontrollable urge to become more creative and do something different. His roommate was Mike Dornbrook, at that time the one and only beta-tester at Infocom and he beta-tested the games on their livingroom table, as Infocom didn't have any space for that yet. Steve occasionally had a look at what Mike was doing and, whenever Mike wasn't around, started bug-hunting himself. Everybody told him he was good at it. He liked it too, and so he joined Infocom in 1981 as a beta tester. When Dornbrook had to leave for business school, Steve became Infocom's sole tester, but, probably sensing his great talent, it was only a year later that Marc Blank asked him if he would like to write a game of his own. He said yes. That prove to be a wise choice, as some of the most popular Infocom games were written by him. Along with Dave Lebling, Steve was one of the only two writers of interactice fiction ever admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America. In September 1999 the US magazine PC Gamer named a list of 25 "Game Gods" in the history of computer gaming. Steve was among them. After Infocom's downfall Steve continued to write games, including "Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2" and the "Spellcasting" series. Together with Mike Dornbrook in 1994 he started his own company, Boffo Games, where he wrote "The Space Bar." The game was great, but unfortunately failed, due to a general low in the adventure gaming market. Steve gave Boffo Games up and, after an interlude at GameFX as designer, nowadays works as creative director for the online-gaming portal worldwinner.com. (Courtesy www.infocom-if.org.)
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