Danny: 00:10 Welcome gorillas, grues, froods, citizens of Po-Peri one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. Eric: 00:21 and Eric Oestrich. Danny: 00:24 And we have with us today a man who never forgets his towel, the legendary Steve Meretzky. We're going to talk about pretty much anything he'll give us an answer to from the days of computer gaming's infancy at Infocom right up through today. Welcome to you Steve. Steve: 00:39 Thank you. Glad to be here. Danny: 00:42 You started out at, of course, what would become Infocom testing the original Zork. What was it like transitioning from testing to being able to make your own game in Planetfall? Steve: 00:56 Well just a correction. It wasn't actually Zork that I started out testing Deadline was actually the first dollar I earned in the game industry. I did plays Zork while it was in testing just because my roommate Mike Dornbrook was the official game tester on the product and the Apple II was sitting there and I took advantage of it. But yeah. Then a year or so later, you know, Mark said, "hey, do you want to try writing a game?" And for good part of a year I sort of split my time between working on Planetfall and continuing to do testing. It was kind of interesting because unlike a lot of the other game writers at Infocom, I didn't have that much of a programming background. I had taken a couple of programming courses at MIT, but you know, I certainly wasn't a computer nerd in the classic sense. So there was a bit of a learning curve there. But I guess I just really took to the creative end of it really well. I found, you know, that I had no trouble with kind of the idea of being an implementer from a conceptual point of view. I found it very easy to kind of combine the creative and technical aspects that are involved in putting an Infocom game where, or really, you know, any piece of interactive fiction together. Danny: 02:15 Had you had an interest in gaming back in the day where it was basically Atari, or a few of the other systems like the games on the Apple. So did you have an interesting in playing games back then? Steve: 02:29 I suppose I had as much of an interest as anyone at hanging out in arcades and playing the space invaders and Pacmans and other arcade hits of the day. But I didn't own any sort of home system or PC of any kind. I had played a number of games on the mainframes at MIT when I was there. Things like Maze or you know there was a very early Star Trek game that was pretty popular. But yeah, I wouldn't say that I was a particular consumer of games. Eric: 03:00 What was it like when the graphical games started coming out from the text input ones like the Sierra's Gold Rush through the peak of the genre with Grim Fandango, Monkey Island and the like? Steve: 03:13 The early Sierra graphic adventures were already coming out by the time I joined Infocom. Wizard and the Princess was probably the most notable one. You know, the first of the so called High-Rez graphic adventures. And we were looking at them and you know, kind of wondering how much we should be worried about them, wondering how much we should be imitating them or moving in that direction at that time. And sort of in the Apple II era. You know, we definitely felt that the quality of graphics that a PC could do was not impressive enough to really kind of consider spending any time on, you know, we felt that the pictures that you could paint with words were still so much more effective then. You know, two or three years later when the Macintosh came along and then the Amiga and you know, the PCs started getting better and better with improved graphics cards. Certainly the sort of images that you could produce with a computer became more impressive. Steve: 04:12 At that point we re-evaluated the idea of just being all text and you know, in the final days of Infocom began moving in a graphic direction. But it was, you know, by that point the other companies in the adventure game space had quite a headstart on us. And also a big sort of part of the Infocom philosophy was to be machine independent. And that was of course very easy with text games. But as we started moving into graphic games and attempted to consider maintaining our position as a company producing machine independent games,that was a lot more problematic. And rather than just producing, say an Apple II game or a Macintosh game or an Amiga game and then worrying about porting it later, we tried to, you know, make it on all platforms right out of the gate. And that was, you know, that I think was one of the things that really led to the downfall of the final round of Infocom games that they'd finally adopted graphics. Danny: 05:19 Speaking about having graphics. So Zork Zero has I guess graphics, it has a skin around it. It's kind of like the shell of a graphical game with the terminal inside. Did that really affect the reception of that game in any way compared to just the raw terminal style interactive fiction that of course came before that? Steve: 05:44 Yeah. Well, I mean Zork Zero, you know, as you're pointing out, it sort of had the graphical border and had an in game mapping feature. It had several mini games that were graphical, but for the most part it was still a text adventure. I mean, it didn't really change the fundamental user experience of the game, so it was really more of just a dipping of the toe in the graphical waters than it was kind of a complete rethinking of what we were doing. Whereas of course there were other Infocom games of that era, you know, probably most notably Fooblitzky the online board game that completely got away from kind of what made an Infocom game and Infocom game. Eric: 06:22 Sorry, I just had to look that up. Hadn't heard of Fooblitzky before. Steve: 06:25 It was not a marketplace success, shall we say. You know, humongous cost of goods. It had like four big kind of erasable boards that came in and four markers and, you know, a number of other package elements. Eric: 06:45 Did the IMPs ever look into developing a multiplayer games with the debuts of mud1 and mud2? Steve: 06:53 No. In those days, you know, multiplayer games on home PCs were pretty primitive. I mean, I guess you could have local multiplayer, but in terms of, you know, multiplayer across Genie or Compuserve or any of those sorts of things, they were difficult and primitive and really limited your market. So no, we never really even talked about it. Danny: 07:15 The graphical crop of adventure games, most notably King's quest gave us the term moonlogic for the puzzle which is not really in any way intuitive. And of course the most infamous puzzle probably of all time, the Babelfish puzzle, which you have a hand in, most of it can be intuited, but it's pretty well known the last part is kind of just throwing things at the wall until it works. What was the atmosphere in Infocom with development around ensuring that moon logic wasn't a thing? Or was it even a concern at all? Steve: 07:58 Yeah, well, I mean I think the first few games we really had no testing other than, you know, for Zork I or II, it was my roommate Mike Dornbrook. For Deadline it was really just me. So there were just very few people who were exposed to a game before it actually went out into the public. And so if for example, you know, the very small number of people who were exposed to the game just happened to not have a problem with a particular puzzle, then you know, it would be deemed, you know, kind of fair or not too hard or not too obscure. Steve: 08:39 I think a good example is in the game Starcross, which was Infocom's fourth or fifth game, it came out around the same time as Zork III. So one or the other of those was 4 and the other one was 5 in Starcross. So basically it's a game in which you are in a one-man spaceship in the solar system and you come across an alien spacecraft which has entered the solar system and you go there to investigate it. So the first puzzle was just navigating to the alien spaceship itself and that was basically the copy protection you needed, the map that came in the package in order to, you know, figure out how to navigate to the spaceship. But then once you got there, there was basically one puzzle, the door of the spaceship and then you were inside the spaceship and the whole environment opened up and there were many, many puzzles open to you. Steve: 09:36 But that puzzle, that involved getting through the door basically was a model of the solar system. And it is described as basically a big bump in the center that was supposed to be the sun and then a number of other bumps around it representing the planets and you had to press the bump that corresponded to earth. And that was because the sun was referred to as the first bump earth was referred to as the fourth bump. But everyone tried pressing the third bump because of course, you know, earth is always thought of as the third planet. So I had, you know, no problem with that puzzle. I kind of correctly interpreted it as meaning fourth bump equals earth. But then once it got out in public, huge swaths of people got to that puzzle press the third bump and it didn't work. And you know, basically kind of gave up and never saw 98% of the game. So that was, that was sort of a huge problem that you know, certainly would have been solved had a dozen people seen the game before it went out instead of just a couple. Danny: 10:40 Did you get a lot of, I know that you get fan mail because of course your website has the fan mail on it. Did you get a lot of fan mail in Infocom for the various games of how do I figure out this puzzle? Steve: 10:54 Well in the very early days and this is even before I was involved in Infocom, the Zork I and Zork II package had a little slip of paper and it's saying, you know, do you need a hint, just, you know, send your question along with a check for $3 or something to this post office box in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And basically they would be answered by hand probably mostly by my roommate Mike. Steve: 11:20 And then when Mike went off to business school, he actually started a company called the Zork Users Group and essentially invented the concept of the hint booklet. And particularly innovatively, the hint booklets were printed in invisible ink. So you would only, you know, reveal the one hint you needed. And even more, kind of subtly, each question didn't just, you know, when you revealed it, it didn't just tell you what to do. It gave you like a super obscure hint and then a slightly less hint, you know, all the way to, okay, you know, if you still haven't figured it out, this is what you do. And actually also, I mean, when I first started and I was still doing QA, another one of my jobs was to take the occasional phone call that came in and give hints in person over the phone. Steve: 12:10 And yeah, that was you know, most of them were the same handful of, of questions, although sometimes they were pretty hilarious. Like in Zork II there was a room that was spinning round and round called the carousel room and you could never tell what exit you were going to go to when you left that room until you could figure out how to stop it. And I remember one time answering the phone and someone said, can you tell me how to stop that carousal room? Which is actually pretty funny when you think about a room spinning and calling it a carousal room. Danny: 12:44 Oh, that's, yeah, that is pretty fun. Yeah. Infocom produced a pretty diverse set of themes for games. You know, there was fantasy, space, adventure, whatever we want to call Leather Goddesses of Phobos. What was the process for what was going to be made was it, you know, a designer had an idea and just wanted to make the game? Steve: 13:11 That was certainly the way things worked at first. But then as the company matured and as we, you know, got more products in our lineup, then marketing came up with this thing that they called the matrix, which was basically a matrix where one axis was the genres. So fantasy, science fiction, adventure like cutthroats. And then the other axis was the level of difficulty. So, you know, beginner, intermediate, expert. And so we kind of looked for, Oh well, you know, we don't have any beginner. Oh, there's also a sort of a juvenile, a genre with things like a Moonmist and Seastalker. So anyway, you know, we would just look for spots in that matrix that were unoccupied and then there would be pressure on a game writer to create something that would fill in that spot in the matrix. Eric: 14:07 What was it like in the industry at large back in the 80s watching Atari ruin the console market and the rise of Nintendo? Steve: 14:16 Well, I mean, we were pretty distant from the console market and almost felt like a different industry, you know, so we, we kind of watched that, you know, I'd say, you know, with amusement more than you know, alarm or any kind of real feeling of connection. At Infocom we were pretty set apart from the rest of the industry. We were of course in Massachusetts. Whereas, you know, most of the industry was in the Bay area. There was one other major game company in Cambridge, which was Spinnaker who actually for a while, tried adventure games, particularly adventure games where they work with licensed authors like Bradbury. And I think Michael Creighton was one. But anyway, I, you know, really didn't have much contact with people in the industry outside of Infocom. And then when Infocom shut down in 89, I didn't really have much in the way of a network or connections. And coincidentally, just a few days after the Infocom shutdown was the third game developers conference, which back then was called the computer game developers conference. And so even though I hadn't been planning on going, I went and met many of the top people in the industry, many of whom are still my friends to this day. So that really kind of represented the start of my being kind of involved in the wider game community. Danny: 15:42 I'd like to talk about a game that doesn't come up in many, if, if any at all interviews. And it's important to me because when I was a kid, I guess I'm dating myself and everyone else in the room now. I played Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I bought it at Babbage's in the box. My parents let me, I think I was seven or eight and yeah, my parents were hippies basically; at least my mother was. So I bought the game and a hugely formative moment for me. And I of course have spent my life designing games that professionally, but as a hobby, the T-Remover, which comes very early in the game, well first you choose your gender by choosing a bathroom, which to me is still a mind blowing way to choose a starting thing like a gender or race or a class, but then the T-Remover, which is so supremely meta and not only the humor of it, but just what it does that it literally removes the letter T from something in the world was huge for me that this is something that games could do, that you could be this meta, that it wasn't just about portraying reality. Of course the first thing you put in it as a rabbit and you get a rabbi. And me being, you know, growing up Jewish, that was really God damn hilarious. How did you come up with the T-Remover and, and some of the other some of the other things in that game? Steve: 17:16 It's actually a really interesting story. I mean, when I get together with game designers, you know, a common topic is just what things make you more creative. Where do you get your best ideas and a very common, you know, kind of a point of agreement that is basically just kind of doing routine activities where you know most of your brain isn't needed, you know, so driving, taking a shower, mowing the lawn, those, those sorts of things where you know 10% of brain is needed for whatever activity you're doing. But the other 90% is just sort of sitting there with nothing to do and everyone seems to agree that that's a time when good ideas come along. And, and I would say many good ideas of mine have come in those sorts of situations. But with the T-Remover, that idea and nothing else in like 30 years of of creating games has ever happened like this, I just woke up and the kind of like there was like in my mind, you know, as as sort of my thoughts coalesce in the first few seconds of being awake. Yeah. And it wasn't just the T-Remover itself, but it was sort of that whole puzzle. So King Mitre and everything he touched turned into a 90 degree angle and how he had touched his daughter and his daughter had turned into a 90 degree angle. And then, you know, having a bottle of untangling cream and using the T-Remover to turn that into un-angling cream and that would restore King Mitre's daughter, that whole puzzle and, and all its myriad parts was just like, they're in my brain at the moment I woke up. So, you know, I mean I wish that that kind of thing happened more often because it was such a good puzzle. But I have no way to explain it. Danny: 19:02 The lead up because you get the T-Removerover almost immediately, you know, once you get out of the spaceship and it's very, it's like the third or fourth room or something very early and then you don't actually get to use it until much later in the game. It's like sitting there in your inventory and it has so much weight. Like what can you do with this? I can remove the letter T from anything. Steve: 19:22 Anything that fits in the T removers compartment of course. Danny: 19:26 Well, yeah, yeah, of course. Steve: 19:27 Yeah. I mean, I, I love puzzles like that where, you know, yeah, the item, you know, is sort of been with you for so long that you, you kind of almost forget about it. You know, it's, it's, it's almost like, you know, an old pair of slippers or something. Another good example I think was "the thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is" in Hitchhiker's guide. It's sort of always there and your inventory, you can't even get rid of it and you kind of stopped thinking about it and then only much later in the game, you know, does it turn out that it does something useful? Danny: 19:56 Let's fast forward a little bit past Infocom and I, I don't know that it's, it's definitely not the game you, you'll be most known for forever because that's Hitchhiker's guide. How is anything ever going to be more prescient than Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's guide? But Hodge N' Podge of course we referenced in the, in the intro, what was the genesis of deciding to do like kind of a, just a mini game collection type game. Like just all these board games and then to boot and put a story around it, which is terribly interesting. I mean it doesn't really affect mini-games themselves or the idea of mini games, but it's, it's an interesting progression. Steve: 20:36 Well, I actually started tinkering with that idea back when I was still at Infocom and in fact just recently I came across in 1989 design doc for the game. And the genesis of it really was in the really early days of PCs. I'm talking like kind of in 80/81 PCs could only do pretty simple games of the sort that became the mini games in Hodge N' Podge. Then as PC has gotten more and more robust games got more and more complex and deep and you would never make simple solitaire games or you know, simple arcade games and then sell them because no one would pay, you know, 30 or $40 for that at a time when you could pay 30 or $40 and get an Ultima or something like that. Steve: 21:25 And yet, you know, I, I really had, you know, kind of a very fond memory of those. Pretty simple games that you could play in just a few minutes. And I thought, well how could we sort of bring those back to the market? And at that point, you know, there, there was only one way to sell games, which was to put them in a box and sell them in a store for 30 or $40 there was no internet, there was no indie games market, you know, there was no other distribution channels, et cetera. So I was thinking, well if one game like that, you know, is sort of too small to to make it in the retail games channel, you know, what if there were a whole bunch of them. And then I thought, okay, well you know, if you had 10 or 20 of these in a box, you know, okay that might justify a 30 or $40 selling point. Steve: 22:11 But having a bunch of sort of unrelated mini games in a box just seeing kind of weak or lame to me. So that was how I came up with the idea of the sort of board game mechanic that linked them all together. So you know, you could play the board game and in the course of playing the board game played the mini games or if you wanted to you could just, you know, basically play the mini games directly without launching a board game if you so chose. Anyway, so flash forward to 1994 when I had my own studio and we pitched a bunch of games to a company called MediaVision. They were a company that had gotten their start doing computer hardware sound cards mostly and then later CDROM upgrade kits when CDROMs came along. But most computers didn't have one. So people were basically buying these CDROM upgrade kits to put a CDROM into their PC. Steve: 23:10 So they had a lot of money and wanted to start a software division. So we signed on with them to make Hodge N' Podge. We were a few months into the development of the game when it turned out that MediaVision had been completely cooking the books. They restated their previous years earnings from plus 30 million to minus 120 million. The CEO and the CFO both resigned and were also under investigation by the FBI and the SEC. So it was a mess. Our game ended up getting sold off in bankruptcy court to Virgin Interactive. Eric: 23:44 ZIL was released to the public on Github. Were you a part of that at all and what do you think about it? Steve: 23:51 No, I wasn't a part of it. I think that was mostly the work of Jason Scott who made the interactive fiction documentary called Get Lamp. I was only involved in that after it happened. Github wanted me to come in and do an interview to sort of publicize it. Danny: 24:09 Speaking of interviews and this we're gonna, we're gonna close out with a, a bit of a weird one. What was it like being in a rap music video? New Speaker: 24:18 Well that's, that's interesting cause again, that's the work of Jason Scott. He basically wanted that piece as a, essentially either promotional item, for Get Lamp or at least sort of an Easter egg on the, the Get Lamp DVD. But when we made that, he filmed my piece and he filmed MC Frontalot's piece separately. So at the time I didn't meet MC Frontalot when we were making that video. I did subsequently meet him. Actually the first time I met him was at a PAX. He was just coming off a show that he did at the PAX and I was in the hotel lobby playing board games with some friends. This was probably like two or three in the morning. And you know, I saw him walking through the lobby and I called them over and, and that was how we met. And then I've met him several times since then. But yeah, when, when we made that video it was, you know, completely separate roles. Danny: 25:15 I'd like to thank you for coming on the podcast and, and answering all of our, kind of weird off ball questions about about your history and the history of Infocom. Steve: 25:26 No, it's always, always fun to dive back into all those memories.