Game Design

October release. The game quickly shot to number one on the best-seller lists, and stayed there for months. I’ve seenHitchhiker’ ...

Did you meet much resistance from within Infocom to do the title, or did the success of your previous games grant you the freedo ...

majority of computer games lose money. So I think that as difficult as it is in cinema to get something made that is kind of exp ...

Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 179 The party was held in the large central room of Infocom’s office space, which dou- ble ...

made everyone feel a lot better about the acquisition. Unfortunately, Jim was axed by Activision’s board of directors about a ye ...

strategy should be to put out as many games as possible.” We put out eight games dur- ing 1987, whereas in any previous year we’ ...

aimed at a middle-brow audience, at kind of the broadest audience. And much like many of the Infocom games, Lucas games tended t ...

along, starting withAMFV, and then another pretty major revamping around ’87 with the introduction of an entirely new, much more ...

typed in an improper kind of a sentence, such as asking a question or using a non-imperative voice. It would try to notice if th ...

impromptu brainstorming, or requests for help/advice. But once the game went into testing, first among the other writers, then w ...

once said, “put meat on the bones.” Lots of the humor, the responses to wacky inputs, the subtle degrees of difficulty, the elim ...

our games. It was more difficult and less cost effective to need to copy a bunch of pack- age elements as well as the floppy dis ...

Our always improving development environment, parser, et cetera, was a big rea- son for the high level of quality. The talented ...

It’s interesting that books seem to be able to coexist alongside television and film. Why do you think text adventures cannot se ...

menus for a number of reasons. One, they were way more kludgey and time-consuming than just typing inputs. Two, they were giveaw ...

have a whole lot less “meat on the bones” than the Infocom text adventures. You get a lot more of those infuriating vanilla resp ...

The game seems to automatically do a lot of things for the player that other RPGs would require the player to do for themselves. ...

working onHobokenand I like playing role-playing games, so I definitely wouldn’t mind working on another one. Hodj ’n’ Podjwas c ...

How didThe Space Barproject come about and what were your design goals for the project? That’s another idea that had been brewin ...

enthusiasm on their part and repeated reminders on our part, Rocket Science never did anything about it. Correct me if I’m wrong ...