Interview with Steve Meretzky, co-author of the Game
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Conducted by MJ Simpson

In 1984 Douglas Adams got together with Steve Meretzky of Infocom to 
create the Hitchhiker's Adventure Game. In this interview Steve explains 
how the project evolved.

Spoiler Warning: The following answers include details about the puzzles 
within the game.

How did you come to work with Douglas Adams?

Douglas was an Infocom player and fan, and so when he, his agent and his 
publisher began discussing the subject of a computer game adaptation of 
Hitchhiker's Guide, he was pretty adamant that it be with Infocom. Marc 
Blank suggested that I collaborate on the game with Douglas, partly due to 
fortunate timing (I had just completed Sorcerer), partly because many 
people had found Planetfall to be reminiscent of the humor of Hitchhiker's 
Guide, and partly because I was the only implementor who was as tall as 
Douglas.

What was he like?

He was the ideal dinner companion. He could speak intelligently and with 
wit about almost any topic under the sun. Unfortunately, he was also the 
world's worst procrastinator! Otherwise, working with him was great. He 
had such a different perspective on things. He was constantly inventing 
ways to stretch the medium and came up with puzzles and scenes that I'd 
never have thought of in a million years on my own - like having the game 
lie to you,or having an object like "no tea".

What are your memories of working on the game?

The original goal was that we'd do the design together, Douglas would 
write the most important text passages, and I'd fill in around them, and 
I'd do the implementation (read: high-level programming, using Infocom's 
development system). Douglas came to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a week 
when we got started. Then we exchanged emails daily (and this was in 1984, 
when non-LAN email was still pretty rare) and phone calls approximately 
weekly.

Around May 1984, with the game just a few weeks away from its deadline for 
start of alpha testing, and about half the game still undesigned, I went 
over to England. Douglas was behind schedule both with the game and the 
fourth Hitchhiker's book, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. His agent 
had sent him to a country inn in western England, far from the 
distractions of London life. That's where I went, with instructions to 
camp out on his doorstep until the game design was done. We spent four 
days at this really pleasant inn, a former baronial mansion called 
Huntsham Court, sipping expensive wines and designing the game. How can 
life get any better than that?

I then returned to the US and implemented the entire game in about three 
intense weeks, just in time for an abbreviated summer of testing. Douglas 
came back over in September for some final rewriting of key text portions, 
and it was done in time for a late October release. The game quickly shot 
to No 1 on the bestseller lists, and stayed there for months.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game was an adaptation from an already 
much loved radio series (and book and TV show). How did you manage to 
adapt a piece of linear fiction into a compelling piece of interactive 
fiction? Was it a challenging experience?

It was actually ideal for adaptation, because it was a fairly episodic 
storyline and it was an environment filled with all sorts of great 
characters, locations, technologies, etc. while the storyline wasn't as 
important. It was challenging - but good challenging, not bad challenging.

Did Douglas have trouble adapting to the interactive form?
On the plus side, Douglas was already an Infocom fan and had played 
several of our games, so he understood what an adventure game was and he 
understood the abilities and limits of our system. On the other hand, he 
had never written non-linearly before, and that's always a difficult 
process to get a handle on. The beginning of the game (the destruction of 
Arthur's house, and the scene on board the Vogon ship) is quite linear. 
Later, when Douglas became more comfortable with interactive design, the 
game became one of the most ruthlessly non-linear designs we ever did.

I've seen HHGTTG referred to as a particularly hard Infocom game. Do you 
think some of the puzzles were too crazy or obtuse and hence too 
difficult? Why do you think that happened?

Douglas and I both felt that adventure games were becoming a little too 
easy; that the original Zork had been much harder than more recent 
offerings, and the 24/7 obsessive brain-racking was what made these games 
so addictive. We might have overreacted and gone too far in the other 
direction; certainly, Infocom's testing staff was strongly urging that the 
game be made easier. On the other hand, the game's most difficult puzzle, 
the Babel Fish puzzle, became a revered classic, so it's possible that, 
while some people were turned off by the level of difficulty, others were 
attracted by it. My feeling was, and continues to be, that people who find 
the game too hard can get hints, while people who find the game too easy 
are screwed because there's no way for them to make it harder.

Another factor may have been the abbreviated testing schedule for the 
game, because an already-aggressive schedule was made even more so by 
Douglas' spell of procrastination. More time in testing generally results 
in an easier game, because the inclination is that if even a single tester 
found a puzzle too hard it should be made easier.

How did the infamous Babel Fish puzzle originate?

Douglas had the basic idea, and I added some refinements (like the 
Upper-Half-Of-The-Room Cleaning Robot). More interesting is how close the 
puzzle came to being removed from the game; most of Infocom's testing 
group thought it was too hard. I was going into a meeting with them just 
as Douglas was leaving for the airport at the end of his final trip to 
Infocom, and I asked him, "What should I tell them about the Babel Fish 
puzzle?" He said, "What should you tell them? Tell them to f*** off!" So 
the puzzle stayed... and its very difficulty became a cult thing. Infocom 
even sold T-shirts that said "I got the Babel Fish."

Tell us more about how you got the job

The decision was made by Marc Blank (who was Vice President of Development 
at Infocom, and was co-author of several Infocom games including Zork and 
Deadline). Partly it was a matter of timing; I'd just finished my previous 
game, Sorcerer, in early February just as the Hitchhiker's game was ready 
to start. And partly it was Marc's feeling that I'd be a good match for 
Hitchhiker's; among the Infocom game authors (known in company jargon as 
"implementers" or as "imps") I was known for humor, and my first game, 
Planetfall, was considered very Hitchhiker's-like. I'd never 
heard/read/seen Hitchhiker's when I wrote Planetfall, but as Infocom folks 
and outside testers began playtesting the game, so many of them said "this 
reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide" that I borrowed a set of tapes of the 
radio show from a friend and listened to them. I loved it, of course, and 
decided to put an homage to Hitchhiker's into Planetfall, just before it 
shipped. So, near the beginning of the game, when your escape pod lands on 
the planet, a hatch pops open revealing a food kit, a first aid kit, and a 
towel. And if you read the towel, it says something like, "Escape Pod No 
42. Don't Panic!"

What sort of ideas did Douglas have at the start of the project?

His overall take on the game was a fairly direct adaptation of the 
existing storyline. Where he really had a flood of ideas was on some of 
the more incidental stuff, playing with the medium of interactivity and 
text adventures. Things like having an inventory object called "no tea"; 
having the game lie to you; having to argue with the game to get past a 
certain door; having an object called "the thing your aunt gave you which 
you don't know what it is" which keeps coming back to you even if you get 
rid of it; having a player input which results in a parser failure (that 
is, an input which couldn't be understood by the game for some reason) be 
the words which fall through a wormhole in the universe and start an 
interstellar war. And so on.

How much input did Douglas have into the technical side of the game, and 
how much did you have into the writing side?

On the technical side, some of the things Douglas wanted to do were beyond 
the ability of the existing development system. For example, having some 
of the words you type fall through a wormhole in the space-time fabric, 
described above. The typed words needed to be repeated back by the game 
when describing the impact of those words a number of turns later. Another 
example was all the different ways you could say "CARVE ARTHUR DENT ONTO 
THE MEMORIAL" in the lair of the Bugblatter beast of Traal. A third 
example is just the difficulty of parsing an object named "no tea". Some 
of those things required changes to the low-level code that supported the 
development system. That was stuff I couldn't do myself, because I was not 
what you'd call a studly-programmer; I was a tool-user, not a 
tool-creator. So those sorts of changes required intervention by Marc and 
other more wizardly technical folks.

On the writing side, I did quite a bit of the writing. Douglas wrote the 
bulk of the responses to "correct inputs" - game responses to inputs where 
the player has done the right thing. But that's just a small part of the 
text in an adventure game because (unless it's going to be a very short 
game) the majority of the things a player tries to do are not the correct 
thing. So the game has to have a zillion responses for what happens when 
you try to use the Infinite Improbability Drive without first plugging in 
the Atomic Vector Plotter, or what happens when you fail to lie down in 
front of Mr Prosser's bulldozer. I was gratified when, in the final days 
before the game shipped, Douglas remarked that in many cases he couldn't 
tell which bits he'd written and which bits I'd written.

How did you and Douglas work together on the game?

At first I was a little shy to speak my mind, given Douglas' fame and 
brilliance and given that we were adapting his material. As a result, the 
early parts of the game (which are the parts we designed first) are 
structurally weakest, in terms of being too linear and relying too heavily 
on prior familiarity with the Hitchhiker's story. I'm referring to the 
Earth and Vogon Ship sections of the game. Later, as Douglas 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. Douglas always described the structure of 
the game as "pear shaped" - narrow toward the stem end, then suddenly 
ballooning wider, and finally coming together at the end.

I get the impression that Douglas enjoyed writing the game far more than 
writing any of his novels. Would you say this was true?

He did say that he enjoyed working on the game and was very happy with how 
it came out. During the press tour for the game, he almost always started 
interviews by describing the work of a writer as "staring at a blank piece 
of paper or a blank screen until your forehead starts to bleed". As he 
said on many occasions, he wasn't fond of the actual act of writing, and 
I'm guessing he liked working on the game more than working on a novel 
because it interspersed pure writing with more enjoyable activities such 
as game design, a distinct task from writing. For instance, deciding how 
the Babel Fish puzzle would be organized is game design; composing the 
responses for what happens when you dispense a Babel Fish at various 
stages of puzzle completion is writing. Also, Douglas was a real 
technophile, so working with the Infocom development system, which was 
quite an impressive piece of technology for its time, was a real joy for 
him.

Douglas was notoriously bad at hitting deadlines - how did he cope with 
the deadlines at Infocom?

He certainly raised procrastination to an art form. We had a really tight 
schedule for the game - we started work in late February 1984, and we 
wanted to have it out for Christmas of that year (which means that we 
needed to release the code for disk duplication around 1 October, so that 
it could be in stores by around 1 November). But he fell behind schedule 
almost immediately and kept falling further and further behind. Meanwhile, 
he was even further behind on finishing So Long, and Thanks for All The 
Fish, so his agent Ed Victor had sent him to Huntsham Court (see above).

My orders were not to leave until the design of the game was done. While I 
was there, he stayed pretty focused on the game (when he wasn't showing me 
around Devon, or when we weren't enjoying the opulent cuisine of Huntsham 
Court...) One day, probably the last full day I was there, we were trying 
to come up with the ending of the game, the game's ultimate puzzle, which 
would tie up all the loose ends of the story and would use all the various 
items that we had introduced into the game (such as the four pieces of 
fluff). We were totally blocked and not getting anywhere. Douglas 
suggested we drive out to Exmoor National Park. And there, sitting on 
driftwood on the beach, surrounded by sheep, we came up with the ending of 
the game, using the four pieces of fluff to create a seed that would grow 
a plant that produces a fruit which gives you a glimpse of the future and 
predicts which of the ten or so possible tools would be the one tool 
Marvin would need to repair the Heart of Gold and land it on Magrathea.

How good was Douglas' knowledge of computers at this point? And how did 
his knowledge develop over the course of creating the game?

Quite good - he was an early adopter of technology in general, and 
computers in particular. The very first day we worked on the game, he 
showed me a three-dimensional computerized crossword game he'd created. 
And, as I said earlier, he'd already played several Infocom games.

Did Douglas offer comments on any other Infocom games?
He was most impressed by Suspended, by Mike Berlyn. It was an extremely 
innovative game in which you play a disembodied brain controlling a team 
of six robots, with the task of maintaining a complex that controls all 
the automated systems for a planet. An earthquake damages the complex and 
precipitates a crisis. Each robot has its own set of senses and abilities, 
and only by combining their information can you figure out what's going 
on. And only by using the right robot for the right task can you get 
everything done in time.

Was Douglas involved in thinking up the paraphernalia that was included 
with the game?

No, neither of us was involved with the packaging; Infocom's marketing 
chief, Mike Dornbrook, plus Infocom's creative agency, came up with the 
ideas for what would go into the package, after playing earlier 
test-versions of the game.

Did Douglas comment on the use of the little green guy (which he hated) on 
the game's packaging?

He wasn't happy, of course, but I think by that time he was resigned to it 
being the iconic representation of Hitchhiker's in the public's mind.

What sort of publicity did you and Douglas do to promote the game?

There was an initial press conference, at the Rainbow Room in New York. 
Then there were press interviews at the winter Comdex (Las Vegas, November 
1984), plus a swing through the San Francisco Bay Area for more 
interviews. Douglas did some stuff on his own, such as an appearance on 
the David Letterman Show. Douglas was also publicizing So Long... at the 
same time, so the TV appearances were more oriented toward that, with 
hopefully a quick mention of the game thrown in.

My strongest memory of those interviews was that Douglas used the same 
story to break the ice with each interview - the "biscuit story", which 
really happened to Douglas, and which he turned into a fictional encounter 
for Arthur Dent in So Long... It's certainly a terrific story, but after 
the 50th time I heard it I wanted to scream!

How happy was Douglas with the finished game?

He always said he was very happy with it, and it was well-received by both 
game reviewers and players, and it sold extremely well (about 400,000 
copies in initial release, and was No 1 on the bestseller lists for a good 
part of 1985). I think what he really liked about it was having friends 
over and booting the game and watching over their shoulder to see what 
they tried.

Was any serious consideration ever given to a second Hitchhiker's game?

Yes, quite a bit. Douglas wanted to do Bureaucracy first, because he was 
so sick of writing in the Hitchhiker's universe. Contractually, we could 
have written (I think) five more Hitchhiker's games without Douglas' 
involvement, but we of course preferred to have him involved, both for PR 
purposes and because he contributed so much great stuff to the first game. 
So we agreed to do Bureaucracy first, and then that dragged on so long, by 
the time work started on the Restaurant at the End of the Universe game, 
commercial text adventures were already a dying breed. Stu Galley, who 
wrote The Witness and several other Infocom games, was slated to be 
Douglas' collaborator for Restaurant, and he did quite a bit of design 
work for the game; I still have all his notes. But before the game was all 
that far along, Activision (which bought Infocom in 1986) decided that 
text adventures were dead.

Were ideas for any other Douglas Adams-related games ever bandied about?

During the same dinner in May 1984 that Douglas talked to me about his 
ideas for Bureaucracy, he also talked about another idea, a graphical game 
in which your goal is to control the evolution of a world from early life 
forms to intelligent creatures. I never heard any more about it after 
that. A game along those lines was later done by Maxis (the people who 
made SimCity) - although it was way more serious than Douglas' take on the 
idea would have been!

Did you ever work with Douglas on any other projects?

No. When he was working on Starship Titanic and I was working on The Space 
Bar, I did send him an email asking, "Why are we dividing the humorous 
science fiction adventure game market? Next time we should just work 
together." Of course, by the time those two games came out, there was no 
"next time" for adventure games.

How would you sum up Douglas as a person?

The thing I usually say when people ask me what Douglas was like is that 
it was astounding how he could speak so knowledgeably and so interestingly 
on such a wide variety of subjects. People often ask me if he was funny in 
person; he certainly wasn't a make-a-joke-out-of-everything person; I'd 
describe him more as "witty" than "funny". His technophilia was certainly 
a defining characteristic; he always loved a new toy. I remember an 
article he wrote for one of the Macintosh publications right after 
Hypercard was first released for the Mac; his first sentence was something 
like "Mozart, Velcro, and Hypercard - not bad for one civilization."

The last time I saw Douglas was November of 2000, when he was at MIT to 
give his "Last Chance to See" talk. Although we'd traded emails over the 
years, it was the first time I'd seen him in over 10 years. We had dinner 
before the lecture and then went drinking afterward. He showed me a 
Quicktime video of Polly dancing, sort of a music video. I'd seen Douglas 
the humorist, and Douglas the writer, and Douglas the deep thinker, 
Douglas the environmental activist, Douglas the gourmet, and Douglas the 
culture critic, but this was the first time I'd seen Douglas the family 
man, the proud parent.

Why do you think the Hitchhiker's game remains so popular even today?

For one thing, because the original material that the game is based on 
remains so popular today. Also, thanks to the platform-independence of the 
Infocom games, and the work of numerous technically-able Infocom fans, 
Infocom games run on virtually everything, from handheld PDAs to the Web, 
so it's pretty easy to still find the game if you want to play it, 
compared to most other games of its era. Also, the fact that the game was 
so brain-numbingly hard helped to make it a cult favourite.

This is an edited version of an interview conducted by Hitchhiker expert 
MJ Simpson