working onHobokenand I like playing role-playing games, so I definitely wouldn’t mind
working on another one.
Hodj ’n’ Podjwas certainly your most different game up to that point. Were you
trying to appeal to a new audience with the game?
Well, I wasn’t really trying to
appeal to a new audience. As
with all my designs the audience
was basically me. I always just
hope that there will be enough
other people with the same likes
as me to make the game a
success.
The idea forHodj ’n’ Podj
was at least five years old when it
finally became a real project. I
originally conceived of the game
as a way to bring back all those
fun, simple games which had
pretty much disappeared,
because the hard-core gaming
audience which was driving development decisions wouldn’t be satisfied by such sim-
ple games. This, of course, was before those classic games became ubiquitously avail-
able via CD-ROM “game packs” and more recently via the Internet.
At the time, I felt that a collection of such games would need a framework to tie
them together to make them an acceptable economic package, thus the overarching
board game and fairy tale back-story/theme. Of course, in the meantime, many compa-
nies released game packs with no connecting theme or mechanisms, and did quite well
with them. Still, I’m very happy creatively with the decision to make theHodj ’n’ Podj
mini-games part of a larger structure.
It was only after the game was well into development that we began to suspect that
it was going to appeal to a very different gaming audience. This was before the phrase
“casual gamers” had really entered the industry vernacular. As outside testers,
employees’ friends and family, et cetera, began playing early versions of the game, we
were surprised to find it appealing to people who didn’t normally like computer games.
We were particularly pleased and surprised to find how much female players liked it.
And finally, we discovered that the game was appealing to another niche that hadn’t
really been identified yet at that time, “family gaming”: that is, parents and children
playing together. And, thanks to the difficult leveling mechanisms, parents could com-
pete on a relatively level playing field with children, without having to “play down” to a
child’s level. It’s still the only game I’ve ever written that I’ve been able to play myself
for fun, and I still play with my kids every now and then.
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 193
Hodj ’n’ Podj