XYZZYnews Talks to the Bearded Oracle of Yonkers
...otherwise known as Infocom legend Steve Meretzky
by Matt Newsome (2001)

XYZZYnews: How did you feel about leaving Infocom?

    Steve E. Meretzky: Extremely sad. There is no one who worked at 
Infocom who doesn't regard those years as the most fun and creatively 
satisfying years of their lives. Although things had gone downhill during 
the Activision Era (especially once Bruce Davis took over Activision), and 
more and more creative decisions were being made by people in CA who didnt 
care a whit about quality, Infocom was still a fantastic place to be right 
up until the end.

XYZZYnews: Have you left Legend Entertainment?

    SEM: The four games that I wrote for Legend were all as an independent 
contractor. I was never an employee of Legend, so I cant say that Ive left 
Legend. When I started Boffo Games, it certainly reduced the likelihood of 
doing any more games for Legend, but theres always a chance that Legend 
and Boffo could get together for a project.

XYZZYnews: How interested are you now in interactive fiction?

    SEM: Highly interested. If you count Superhero League of Hoboken as 
one-half (it was also partly a role-playing game), then 12.5 of my 14 
games have been interactive fiction. And, in the future, I certainly 
expect that a majority of the games I write will be interactive fiction. 
It is a genre whose possibilities are still mostly unrealized.

XYZZYnews: Do you feel you are making interactive fiction or adventure 
games at Boffo?

    SEM: I consider the terms to be completely interchangable. As far as I 
am concerned, interactive fiction is just a term marketeers invented to 
make the genre sound more high-falluting. Certainly, adventure games isn't 
a perfectly descriptive name for the genre, but it's historically accurate 
in that it pays homage to the grandaddy of the genre, and every computer 
gamer knows what you're talking about when you say adventure game. I feel 
the same way about people who reject science fiction in favor of phrases 
like speculative fiction.

XYZZYnews: What was it like to work with Douglas Adams? Did he keep to 
schedule?

    SEM: Douglas is wonderfully creative, looks at things in a completely 
different way than I do, and comes up with ideas that I never would. On 
the other hand...Douglas has raised procrastination to an art form. 
Hitchhikers Guide would never have gotten done if I hadn't gone over to 
England and virtually camped out on his doorstep.

XYZZYnews: Tell us a little about the plotline in The Space Bar.

    SEM: The game is set on Armpit VI, a drab backwater mining planet. It 
is a company planet in the way that some towns are company towns. You are 
a company cop, working for the Amalgamated Vacuum Security Force. You are 
a human being on a planet where humans are a despised minority. There has 
been a break-in at corporate HQ, and some extremely valuable blueprints 
and prototypes have been stolen. The criminal is known to be hiding out in 
a spaceport dive known as The Thirsty Tentacle. You have several hours to 
go into the bar, figure out who the criminal is, and arrest him/her/it 
before they can catch a shuttle to a planet beyond the corporations 
jurisdiction.

    In the bar, you'll have to interrogate dozens of aliens. One of your 
police skills is a technique called Empathy Telepathy, which involves 
getting into the memories of the person youre talking to, and reliving an 
event earlier in their lives. These flashbacks, set on various aliens home 
planets, are small adventure-games-within-the-game, each of which is a 
completely independent story, but each of which also contributes a clue 
you need toward the main story of finding the criminal.

XYZZYnews: What platforms will The Space Bar run on? When will it be 
available and what price (roughly) will it retail at? Will it be marketed 
in Europe also?

    SEM: The Space Bar will be available on PC and Mac. The minimum system 
for the PC version is a P-75 with 16mb of RAM and a 4X CD-ROM drive. I 
don't know the Mac minimum config. It should be available (in English, in 
the U.S.) in October; I dont know anything about pricing. The game is 
being distributed by Rocket Science, and one of their major investors is a 
European distributor, so the game will be marketing heavily in Europe. 
Translation work is already underway for several different languages.

XYZZYnews: How does the BAGEL engine differ from other graphical adventure 
interfaces weve seen of late, such as Z-Vision?

    SEM: Like Z-Vision, BAGEL (Boffo Adventure Game Engine and Libraries) 
displays your environments panoramically, as pioneered by QuickTime VR. 
But that's really where the similarity ends. BAGEL's interface allows for 
much more complex object and character interactions, and provides a deeper 
and richer gameplay that I think you'll find is the closest thing that a 
graphic adventure has come in reproducing the gameplay experience of the 
Infocom text adventures. Basically, I looked at all the graphic adventure 
games and adventure game engines from the last few years, in order to pick 
and choose the features that worked best.

XYZZYnews: Can you give us a broad-brush description of how you at Boffo 
go about writing a game?

    SEM: BAGEL itself is written in C++ and includes a scripting language 
which allows high-level programming of the specific game environments, 
puzzles, object interactions, and character dialogs. All of the underlying 
libraries are written in machine-independent code for easy porting to 
other platforms.

XYZZYnews: How do you feel The Space Bar pushes the boundaries of the 
adventure game genre?

    SEM: As I mentioned earlier, I think it comes closest to recapturing 
the depth weve only seen until now in text adventures, but in a graphic 
adventure format. Also, the flashback structure of the game to some degree 
turns the game from an interactive novel to an interactive short story 
collection (although having the meta-game to keep it all tied together).

XYZZYnews: Some of the latest arcade games are starting to support virtual 
reality headgear. Do you think adventure games would benefit from such a 
feature?

    SEM: I certainly didn't enjoy my one experience with VR headgear -- I 
felt like I was looking through the world with my hands cupped around my 
eyes. Really bad tunnelvision. Also, I kept getting wrapped up in the 
cord. But, if the hardware starts appearing on PCs in large numbers and is 
popular, Ill write games that use it.

XYZZYnews: How do you sleep at night knowing that there are STILL people 
trapped in the GUE, or trying to get a damned babel fish, or trying to 
decipher a strange alien message?

    SEM: When people STOP wanting to enjoy my games, thats when I'll have 
trouble sleeping at night.

XYZZYnews: What is your favourite of all the games you have written?

    SEM: I get asked that a lot, and I dont have any single answer. There 
are various elements from various games that I like a lot or am very proud 
of: Floyd from Planetfall, the scope and political message of A Mind 
Forever Voyaging, the puzzles and GUE history and sheer size of Zork Zero, 
the appeal of Hodj n Podj to many different types of non-computer gamers, 
the blending of adventure and RPG elements in Superhero League of Hoboken, 
the shattering of some computer game taboos with Leather Goddesses of 
Phobos... But overall, no one clear favorite.

XYZZYnews: What is your favorite Infocom game other than those you wrote?

    SEM: Zork II was my favorite for a while, and then Starcross was my 
favorite for a while. The Witness my favorite of the mystery games. 
Suspended wasn't my favorite game, but it was probably the most 
interesting and daringly different game that Infocom ever did. But my 
hands-down all-time favorite Infocom game is Nord and Bert.

XYZZYnews: What is your favorite game of all time?

    SEM: It's hard to name just one, but here are ten of my all-time 
favorites: Pac-Man, Shanghai, Tetris, SimCity, Civilization, The Fools 
Errand, Might and Magic, President Elect, MacRisk, The Incredible Machine. 
As you can see, its quite a diverse group.

XYZZYnews: What is your inside leg measurement?

    SEM: I don't have an inside leg. Just two outside legs

XYZZYnews: So how was the game written? Are you entirely responsible for 
the plot?

    SEM: I had two design assistants, Patricia Pizer and Tomas Bok, both 
confederates in interactive crime dating back to Infocom days. Also, Ron 
Cobb was at a few of the early design brainstorming sessions, so his 
involvement is more than just conceptual design.

XYZZYnews: Were you involved in the technical development of the game?

    SEM: I helped to designed the interface, and to figure out what 
functionality BAGEL ought to have, and have answered (to date) 14, 583 
questions from the programmers, but I haven't done any actual coding 
myself.

XYZZYnews: How long did it take to write The Space Bar?

    SEM: Well, I first started thinking about the idea about 5 years ago, 
so material has been gathering in the back cobwebby corners of my brain 
since then. I started formally working on the design around May of 1995. 
The design was complete enough for engineering and graphics work to 
commence around mid-September of 1995. Writing of the dialog continued 
through the fall, and the first audio recording session was in early 
December. Writing additional dialog to be recorded, text for signs and 
plaques and computer screens and so forth, and other incidental design 
continues even through today.

XYZZYnews: A Mind Forever Voyaging was a profound vision of the future in 
terms of the political and social direction of western society in the 
coming centuries. It was a great success with IF fans and you are 
obviously very proud of it, so why have you never re-entered the genre 
with subsequent works?

    SEM: Well, I continue to meet people now and then who think it was 
great, who think it was my best game, who think it was the best thing 
they've seen on a computer. On the other hand, at the time I got a lot of 
mail from people who were disappointed in the game: too quick, too easy, 
too unlike Zork, etc. And it didn't do that well sales-wise (about 35,000 
which was pretty mediocre for an Infocom game at the time). I would love 
to do other "serious" "message" games, but it's not what publishers seem 
interested in at this time. AMFV was partly made possible by the 
tremendous success of Hitchhiker's Guide...so push The Space Bar a lot, so 
it'll do really well and I'll have the creative freedom to do more games 
like AMFV.

XYZZYnews: Just how formative an experience was packing nuts and bolts in 
your father's hardware business?

    SEM: Clearly, the nuts had more of an impact than the bolts.

XYZZYnews: Are you still the "Bearded Oracle of Yonkers" or did you 
shave/move/lose your voice?

    SEM: I am still bearded, I often give advice on topics ranging from 
lawn care to the proper use of balsamic vinegar, and hardly does a season 
go by where I do not find myself in Yonkers. Speaking of which, a joke: An 
Englishman goes to New York for a vacation. Upon returning home, he was 
asked how his vacation was. He replied, "Oh, I had a smashing time. But 
there's one thing that I'm still puzzled about. What are Yonkers?"