STEVE MERETZKY
Comedy played a key role in Steve’s games, so what shaped his sense of humour? “Many things. Certainly, Warner Brothers cartoons, which were a Saturday morning staple in our household. Monty Python. Early Woody Allen. Saturday Night Live. Just to name a few,” says Steve. He took quite a circuitous route to becoming a game designer, having gone to the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) to study architecture (with a minor in creative writing, which would come in handy). After his years at Infocom, Steve became a consultant and worked freelance with other publishers before founding Boffo Games. A string of bad luck led him into casual gaming, but he can look back on many fondly remembered titles.
How did you end up testing games for Infocom?
I was involved in the movie and lecture group at MIT (the Lecture Series Committee), where I became friends with many of the initial founders of Infocom. After graduation, I was working for a construction company, and not enjoying it. I was sharing an apartment with Mike Dornbrook, Infocom’s sole game tester. When Mike went off to Chicago to go to business school, Marc Blank needed a new tester, so he chose the next best person in our apartment, which was me.
How long did it take to go from tester to Imp (Implementer) while you were there?
About a year, though it was a gradual transition. My first work for Infocom was testing Deadline in November of ’81. I started writing Planetfall around September of ’82, but I kept testing games throughout most of the time that I was writing Planetfall (which was released in the fall of ’93).
What inspired your first game Planetfall, and its legendary robot Floyd?
There had been characters in Infocom games before… the thief in , the wizard in , the many suspects in . But there hadn’t been much focus on a single ‘sidekick’ character. I (at that point, Infocom’s only science fiction title) had been my favourite Infocom game to date.
