How didThe Space Barproject come about and what were your design goals for
the project?
That’s another idea that had
been brewing for a long time. I
think the genesis was actually
back around 1986 or ’87, when
theNew York Timesthreatened
to sue Infocom because of our
customer newsletter being
called theNew Zork Times. Our
lawyer completely poo-pooed
the threat, but when Activision
began negotiating to buy
Infocom, they insisted on all
such “clouds” being removed,
and thus we were forced to
change the name of the newslet-
ter. There was a naming contest open to customers, plus tons of discussions within the
company, and the newsletter ended up being renamedThe Status Line. But in the mean-
time, I suggestedThe Space Barand giving the newsletter the ongoing fiction that it
was being written by denizens of such a bar and populated with ongoing characters who
were “regulars” in the bar. I’m not sure exactly how, but at some point the idea made
the leap from newsletter idea to game idea.
The main design goal for the project was to create an adventure game which was
composed of a lot of smaller adventure games: a novel is to a short story collection as a
conventional adventure game would be toThe Space Bar. In addition to just a desire to
want to try something different, I also felt (once again reflecting my own needs and
wants in my game design) that people had increasingly scarce amounts of time, and that
starting an adventure game required setting aside such a huge amount of time, many
tens of hours. But if, instead, you could say to yourself, “I’ll just play this ‘chapter’ now
and save the rest for later,” it would be easier to justify picking up and starting the
game. Secondary design goals were to create a spaceport bar as compelling as the one
in the firstStar Warsmovie, to create a Bogart-esque noir atmosphere, to be really
funny, and to prove that you could make a graphic adventure that, like the Infocom text
games, could still have a lot of “meat on the bones.” As withHodj ’n’ Podj, I felt that just
a collection of independent games was too loose and required a connecting thread, thus
the meta-story involving Alias Node’s search for the shape-shifter, Ni’Dopal. Empathy
Telepathy was just a convenient device for connecting the “short stories” to the
meta-story.
At the very beginning of the project, Rocket Science was really interested in “syn-
ergies” to “leverage” their projects in other media: movies, action figures, board
games, books, et cetera. I suggested that a great companion project forThe Space Bar
would be to commission an anthology of short stories by SF writers, with each one
selecting one of the characters/races we created forThe Space Barand writing an origi-
nal story about that race or character. Thus, it wouldn’t be a conventional
“novelization” of the game but an interesting companion piece. But, despite initial
194 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky
The Space Bar