Game Design

Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 179

The party was held in the large central room of Infocom’s office space, which dou-
bled as a meeting room and the “micro room” where we had our one Apple II, our one
Atari 800, our one TRS-80, et cetera. One entire wall of this room was a single enor-
mous chalkboard with a permanent handwritten table of all version numbers in release.
Something like this:

TRS-80

Model 1

TRS-80

Model III

Apple

II

Atari

800

IBM

PC

DEC

PDP-11

Zork I 42 42 44 45 42 45

Zork II 17 17 17 19 17 17

Deadline 31 31 29 30 33 33

Zork III 10 12 12 10 13 13

Starcross 28 29 30 28 28 31

That is, every time a new version of a game was compiled in-house, it was given a
new version number. When a given version number was released on a given machine,
that number would be written up on the board. If the supply of, say, Apple IIZork IIIs
ran out, we would order more with the latest approved version, and that particular num-
ber on the board would be updated.
So, to get back to the point of this story, shortly before this party I quietly went over
to the board and added a line for a game calledLeather Goddesses of Phobos. It was just a
hack, and I just picked the name as something that would be a little embarrassing but
not awful. As it turns out, Joel spotted it before anyone arrived and erased it in a panic.
However, the name stuck, and for years thereafter, whenever anyone needed to plug
the name of a nonexistent game name into a sentence, it would beLeather Goddesses of
Phobos.
Then, at some point in 1985, I came around to the idea of actuallydoinga game by
that name. After all, everyone loved the name, and had been loving it for years. I
brought it up as a project that would be a little racy, but that was really more of a take-off
on — and loving tribute to — SF pulp of the ’30s. The idea was instantly accepted by
Marc and the other game writers, as well as by Mike Dornbrook, my ex-roommate, who
by this point had graduated business school and returned to Infocom to head up
marketing.
Upper management took longer to convince, particularly our humorless CEO Al
Vezza, who was really only interested in the business products side of the company and
found doing any games at all distasteful, even though they were wildly successful and
were financing the database project. In fact, a year later, whenLGOPwas nearly done,
and Infocom had been bankrupted by the business products effort, Infocom was in the
process of being acquired by Activision. Activision’s president, Jim Levy (who under-
stood games and game development), was being shown around the offices by Al Vezza.
LGOPcame up, and Al quickly and nervously said, “Of course, that’s not necessarily
the final name.” Jim roared, “What? I wouldn’t call it anything else!” Naturally this