This issue of PC Gamer contains an article called "Game Gods" which ranks the world's 25 greatest gamemakers. Steve Meretzky was the only Infocom Imp to make the list.
Undoubtedly one of adventure gaming's most prolific designers, Steve Meretzky's resume reads like the contents of a "Best Of" compilation. In chronological order, the games he's designed, programmed and produced include (deep breath): Planetfall, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (with Douglas Adams), A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall, Zork Zero, Spellcasting 101, and Superhero League of Hoboken. Most recently, he co-designed and directed SegaSoft's Editors' Choice-winning adventure The Space Bar.
If many of those titles sound unfamiliar, chances are you haven't been interested in gaming for very long. Most of Meretzky's best work was produced in the mid 1980s as a designer for Infocom - perhaps the most visionary and brilliant computer game company in history. Infocom's text adventures (described, not inaccurately, by the company as works of "interactive fiction") transcended the bland descriptions and vocabulary typified by so many games of the era, merging rich narrative prose with an exquisitely crafted story and game design.
Meretzky claims he was interested in gaming from birth. "We were too poor to afford a cradle, so I was bedded in an old Monopoly box," he says. An MIT graduate, he joined Infocom as a game tester in 1981. "It was the best place to work, ever," Meretzky says. "We were on the top of the gaming world, at one point having five of the top ten bestselling games. It was just an amazingly fun, funny, creative, cohesive group of people. I could go on for hours about the reasons for Infocom's success - and later demise - but I think it boils down to a combination of talent, timing, and luck."
UP NEXT
Meretzky, now 42, currently works at THQ's GameFX label as senior game designer, and is helping out with the company's PC remake of the arcade classic, Sinistar. "I've put aside the game I was working on for now so that I can help get Sinistar: Unleashed out the door. I'm helping with some final tuning and with the backstory. It's been fun, though, because it's a real change of pace for me, being a mega-action game, and in getting to work with a stunning 3D space combat engine."
And as for Meretzky's next original? "It's pretty early to say anything, it's probably a couple of years away, but I'm hoping to move into new genres," he says. "Right now, the adventure genre is pretty much dead, but I think it will be revived at some point and be bigger than ever, because that type of gameplay is too much fun to abandon."
Thanks to André St-Aubin for transcribing and donating this article.