Did you meet much resistance from within Infocom to do the title, or did the
success of your previous games grant you the freedom to do whatever you
wanted? Were there fears that the game would be too different?
No resistance at all, and sure, the fact that my games to date had been both critical and
market successes certainly helped. But the Infocom philosophy at the time was to do a
mixture of games aimed at our core audience — theZorkgames andEnchantergames,
for instance — along with a few more experimental games aimed at pushing the enve-
lope creatively and attempting to expand the audience for interactive fiction. Another
example of this latter category were the “junior level” games likeSeastalkerand
Wishbringer,which were an attempt to bring interactive fiction to a younger audience.
There were some slight concerns that the game was a little too puzzle-less, and in fact
we beefed up the puzzles in the last section — not in the epilogue section, but where
Ryder comes and occupies the complex.
AMFValso pushed the envelope in the technical direction, being the first game in
the “Interactive Fiction Plus” line, requiring 128K of memory rather than just 64K. It
was also about twice as large as any other Infocom game to date.
As you mentioned, the moral implications of the game are particularly strong.
Why have you not made a serious game since?
I would like to because I really enjoyed creatingAMFV, and I still feel that computer
games can have as much of an artistic component as books, movies, theater, et cetera.
And I’ve gotten so much feedback over the years from people who were impacted by
AMFV. A couple of people have mentioned to me that they went into the computer
games industry because of playing it.
Unfortunately, even thoughAMFVhad a pretty significant impact on the people
who played it, there weren’t that many people who played it or bought it compared to
other Infocom games: about thirty thousand. And the sort of creative freedom that I had
at Infocom has not been present since. With game budgets soaring into seven figures,
publishers are not interested in anything that is in any way unproven or experimental.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in a group that was attempting to put together
an adventure game whose purpose, in addition to entertainment, was to expose the
plight of Chinese-occupied Tibet. One of the people involved was Bob Thurman, a
Columbia University professor who is one of the leaders of the Free Tibet movement.
He also happens to be the father of Uma Thurman, who would have been in the game
and would have brought along a number of other Hollywood celebrities. Not just actors,
but people like Philip Glass to do the score, et cetera. There was even the possibility of
a cameo by the Dalai Lama. Even with all that marquee value, we couldn’t find a pub-
lisher who was interested.
But it seems that serious works are allowed to exist in other media, alongside
more “fun” or “light” works. Why do you think this is not the case in computer
games?
I think one problem is that the games industry tends to be less profitable than other
media. I’ve heard, for example, that it’s very rare for a movie to lose money once every-
thing is said and done, including foreign distribution, video, and all that. The vast
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 177