The game seems to automatically do a lot of things for the player that other
RPGs would require the player to do for themselves. Was one of your design
goals to make the RPG elements very simple to manage?
Because it was an adventure/RPG hybrid, we guessed that a lot of the players would be
RPG players who were pretty inexperienced with adventures, and a lot of the players
would be adventure gamers who were pretty inexperienced with RPGs. So I tried very
hard to make the puzzles pretty straightforward, and we tried to keep the interface as
simple and friendly as possible, given the highly detailed nature of RPG interactions.
Superhero League of Hobokenseemed to be pretty popular. I was wondering why
you haven’t done another RPG since.
Well, it actually didn’t sell all that
well. I don’t think it sold more
than twenty, twenty-five thou-
sand copies. And it was certainly
pretty disappointing, because I
spent somewhat longer on it,
certainly longer than any of the
other games I did for Legend.
And it got quite good reviews, so
the sales numbers were pretty
disappointing. I think it was
Accolade who distributed that,
but at the time Legend was not
doing all that well financially, so they didn’t really do that great a job on the marketing
side. As the publisher but not the distributor, their job was to handle all the advertising
and PR, and they couldn’t really afford to do all that much on either front. And Accolade
as a publisher was certainly not as strong a publisher as someone like an EA might have
been.
And I think something that really hurtSuperhero Leaguea lot was that the game
was delayed about a year from its original release date. That was partly due to the delay
of the previous games in the Legend pipeline ahead of it, and partly due to the fact that
the game was trying to do some things that couldn’t be done in the Legend develop-
ment system, and this required some extra support. They hired a programmer to do
that, and he kind of flaked out, and therefore it had to be rewritten by internal resources.
So this served to delay the game, and it ended up coming out middle of ’95 instead of
middle of ’94. And it was a regular VGA game. So, in the meantime, everything had
become Super VGA. So by the time it came out it looked very dated. In fact, I remember
another game that came out around the same time wasColonization. And I remember
playingColonizationand being shocked at how awful it looked. I’m sure the experience
was very much the same for people looking atHobokenfor the first time.
So would you ever want to do another RPG?
Certainly a lot of the projects that I started working on at GameFX were role-playing
games, but of course none of those came to fruition. I certainly very much enjoyed
192 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky
Superhero League of Hoboken