and subsequently with his own company, Boffo Games, which produced the
lovelyThe Space Bar. Currently, Meretzky is involved with the Internet game
company WorldWinner.com. Of late, adventure games have fallen out of
favor with publishers, game audiences, or some combination of both. One
cannot help but wonder: what happened to the adventure game fans that
made Infocom such a huge success?What initially attracted you to computer games?
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, I was actually pretty repelled by computer games and, in
fact, by all things computer-ish. I considered them nerdy and antisocial, and it seemed
that whenever the talk turned to any computer-related subject, English went right out
the window. Lots of people in my dorm were playing the original mainframeZork, since
it was being written at the Lab for Computer Science, and I found their preoccupation
with the game pretty distasteful. I played a little bit ofMaze Warsat the Lab, and I had a
brief fling withSpace Invaders, but that was about it.
Until, in ’81 my roommate Mike Dornbrook was Infocom’s first and, at the time,
only tester. He started testingZork Ion an Apple II on our dining room table. When he
wasn’t around, I started playing a little and was soon very hooked.Zork IIsoon followed
Zork Iinto our dining room “test lab.” I reported all the bugs that I found, even though
Mike was getting paid to find bugs and I wasn’t.
So that led to employment at Infocom?
At MIT, I majored in Construction Project Management, and that’s the work that I did
for the first couple of years after I graduated in June of ’79. It was awful: tedious work,
boring people, far-from-cutting-edge companies. So, in the fall of 1981, when my room-
mate Mike Dornbrook went off to business school in Chicago, Marc Blank (VP of
Development at Infocom) needed a new tester for his forthcoming mystery game,
eventually namedDeadline. Since I had proven myself an able tester while testingZork
IandIIfor free, he hired me on an hourly basis as the replacement tester for Mike. At
this point, Infocom still had no office, and just one or two full-time employees. I contin-
ued to test at home on the Apple II.
In January of 1982, Infocom moved into wonderful office space at the edge of Cam-
bridge, and I started working out of the office, testingDeadlineand then laterZork III
and Dave Lebling’s first post-Zorkeffort,Starcross. In June, I began as a half-time
employee, having been just a contractor up to that point.
Even at this point, I didn’t really have any plans to become a game author—Iwas
just having a good time doing something fun for a change and waiting to figure out what
I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had minored in writing at MIT, and had submit-
ted some science fiction stories to various magazines, but didn’t get anything
published.
So how did you come to make the jump from tester to author? Did you have to
prove yourself first?
Sometime late in the summer of ’82, Marc Blank asked me if I’d be interested in writing
a game. I agreed right away, pretty much thinking that, while testing games was quite a
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 173