INTERVIEW | Steve Meretzky: Planetfall and Stationfall

Chris Schmidt and Gunnar Lott talk with one of their personal heroes, Steve Meretzky.

Steve Meretzky is a famous game designer, he was one of the key people at legendary computer games developer Infocom. In the 1980s, he was responsible for several of the company’s best projects, most notably Planetfall, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Our conversation with Steve focuses on the creation of Planetfall, a text adventure game for PC published in 1983.

This interview was conducted by Christian Schmidt and Gunnar Lott in June 2024 via VoIP call. The recording was originally published as an audio podcast on our Patreon page (public for everyone) and it is also available with chapter marks and images on YouTube. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

Stay Forever: Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Steve Meretzky: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Stay Forever: Steve, today we would like to talk about Planetfall and its sequel, Stationfall. Take us back to 1981. I think that was the time when you joined Infocom as a playtester. How did that come about?

Steve Meretzky: Right. At the time, I was sharing an apartment with Mike Dornbrook, who was Infocom’s first tester. And at that point, Infocom had no office, so he was just testing on an Apple II in our dining room. He was testing first Zork 1 and then Zork 2. So this is really going back certainly into 1980, maybe even into 1979. But often when Mike wasn’t around, I would play whatever the latest build was on that Apple II. And of course, the game at that point was very buggy, and I would write down bugs as I found them. The difference was Mike was getting paid when he did that, and I was doing it for free. But the benefit was that after a year of that, Mike went off to business school. At that point, Mark Blank was writing the next game for Infocom, which was Deadline. And he needed someone to test it. And because I had shown with my free testing of Zork 1 and Zork 2 that I was pretty good at it, he said, how would you like to be the tester for Deadline? It’s just very crazy to think back on it now that those games went out with just a single person having playtested them. But I said, sure. And so November of 1981 is officially the first dollar that I earned in the game industry. And then I tested Deadline, I tested Starcross, I tested Zork 3. And then around the fall of 1982, Mark said, how would you like to try writing a game of your own? And I said, sure. So over most of the course of 1983, I was sort of splitting my time between continuing to test and working on that first game, which became Planetfall. Certainly, toward the beginning of that year, probably a lot more testing and a lot less working on the game. And toward the end of the year, a lot more working on the game and a lot less testing. But that’s pretty much how it happened.

Stay Forever: And at that point, when your roommate worked for Infocom, were you still a student?

Steve Meretzky: No, this was a couple of years after I graduated. So I graduated with a degree in construction project management.

Stay Forever: From MIT?

Steve Meretzky: Yes. And spent the first about two years after I graduated working for three different construction companies and pretty much hating every minute of it. Certainly in school, I was pretty interested in the topic and using computers and computer-aided programs to find the critical path in a project and map it all out. And then once I got into the real world, it was kind of a splash of cold water. None of these companies was sort of interested in those newfangled techniques. And as one boss said to me once, “Oh, no project manager worth his salt needs a computer to tell him what needs to be done next.” And so I definitely was not enjoying my work. And so when I got this opportunity to become a game tester instead, that wasn’t a hard choice at all.

Stay Forever: I read an interview that you gave in 1987, so in the year that Stationfall came out, in which you said that you had never owned a computer up to that point, and that you in fact hated computers.

Steve Meretzky: I certainly hated them in college, because in college, everyone who was into computers was mind-numbingly, boringly into computers. It’s all they talked about. And of course, as soon as they began talking about it, they essentially switched into this foreign language, you know, where everything was an acronym or other jargon, and they were just the most boring people to hang around with. So it wasn’t that I hated computers so much as I hated computer people. And then of course, it was before personal computers. So what computers in my time at MIT meant were like big mainframes that you could only access via a remote terminal or the first programming course that I took actually use punch cards where we would basically punch little holes into these sort of, I don’t know, cards that were a few inches tall and maybe eight inches wide. And then you take a stack of them. Basically, each stack was like the equivalent of a line of code in a program. And then basically you would feed that into a computer and then the computer would run the program and give you the result. And so for that several seconds or minutes, you completely were using 100% of the resources of a mainframe computer. And oh my God, I remember the one time I screwed up a program and caused the computer to go into an infinite loop. Man, did I get dressed down by the TA who was in charge of the computer at that particular point in time. But yeah, it was really the dawn of personal computers around 1980, just about the time that I was graduating, that computers, for the first time, became interesting to me. Because I had access to all of them at Infocom, I never had a computer of my own. The first one I had was a Mac SE, one of the little early kinds of cubicle Macs, which I got around 87, I think.

Stay Forever: Typically, if you talk to people who got into the computer games or video games industry in that era, they either come from a programming background, so a keen interest in computer technology coding, or from a, let’s say, storytelling background, so interested in narrative and interactivity, etc. Is any of these two true for you, or are you coming from a different angle?

Steve Meretzky: Well, certainly in my case, I’m in that second category. But what was interesting was among all the game writers at Infocom, we had me with my construction background. There was Stu, he majored in physics. Dave Lebling majored in political science, I think. Brian Moriarty, I think, was an English major. Mike Berlyn, I think, majored in LSD. And so none of the game writers had a computer background. I mean, all of them, or most of them anyway, had certainly a lot of computer background, but weren’t computer majors. Whereas the president of the company, Joel Berez, wasn’t a computer major, and he was like the only one at the company who actually wasn’t doing any hands-on computer programming.

Stay Forever: When you started out at Infocom, this was a full-time position, right? Did you go to an office or did you work from home like your friend?

Steve Meretzky: Well, when I first started testing Deadline, that was just on an hourly basis. Then, I think January 1st of 1982, I became a 50% employee. And then, I think about the middle of that year, maybe June of 1982, then I became a full-time employee.

Stay Forever: Did you work in an office or from home?

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, so Infocom got its first office in January of 1982. It was a pretty small office. It was basically one large conference room surrounded by maybe eight small offices and that one central conference room acted as a conference room and it also acted as what we called the micro room where we had one of every computer, you know, one TRS-80 Model 1, one TRS-80 Model 3, one Apple II, one Atari 800, and so on.

Stay Forever: That was where you playtested then or did you do this in your office or did you go to the micro room and tried it out than every computer?

Steve Meretzky: I mean, typically most of the playtesting really happened on a terminal connected to our DEC 20, a big mainframe computer off-site where we just rented time and that was where the game development occurred. And for most of the time that the game was under development, the playtesting also occurred on the DEC 20. It was probably only toward the very end of development when you were getting closer to release that you would start doing any testing on the individual PCs.

Stay Forever: How was office life and collaboration?

Steve Meretzky: Well, I mean, at that point in early 1982, it was really just me and Mark and Joel and Gabrielle McCarty, who was sort of our office manager slash head of sales. I can remember one time we were kind of waiting for Joel to get off the phone so that we could go to lunch. And Joel, you know, finally got off the phone and we started leaving for lunch. And he said, you know, at some point the company is going to be too big that we can’t all go to lunch together. And of course, two years later, we were more like 100 people.

Stay Forever: So would you say that is the reason why they gave you the chance to write your own game?

Steve Meretzky: Well, I had known Mark for a number of years from our time at MIT. And so I think he kind of knew me to be a funny and creative guy. And I think also through my suggestions as I was playtesting his games, it also came out that I sort of understood the medium and kind of had a good sense for creatively what worked and what didn’t work.

Stay Forever: So your first game is Planetfall, and Planetfall is a science fiction game, obviously. Now, at the point when you started creating Planetfall, Infocom already had two science fiction games either out or in development, and that is Starcross and Suspended. So I wonder, how did you decide on a genre back then at Infocom? Was this your own decision, or did somebody come to you and say, hey, it would be cool if you were to create a science fiction game?

Steve Meretzky: No, it was pretty much each game writer’s decision. I mean, I went with science fiction because that was my favorite genre as a reader, and I didn’t really even give it any thought. It was just kind of an instant decision as I began working on the game that, of course, it would be science fiction. Starcross had probably been my favorite game of the first five Infocom games, the three Zorks and Starcross and Deadline. And yeah, I mean, there was no issue with that. I mean, in those days, the early adopters of PCs, the people who would be buying and playing our game tended to be the sort of people who liked science fiction and fantasy anyways. So kind of the no-brainer genres to be creating games in.

Stay Forever: And then you started out creating your own game, but how did you do it? Did you write stuff on paper? Did you map the game out?

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, I mean, Planetfall was certainly different from my later games, because for one thing, I was learning the development system at the same time I was creating the game, which wasn’t the case later on. But the first thing I did was write, if I recall correctly, about a seven-page story that was just sort of the story of the game told linearly. And that wasn’t really like anything that I would ever do on any of my future games. So I did that. And at that point, the name of the game was Sole Survivor. I don’t really recall when we changed the name from that to Planetfall or who came up with it or how it came up, but I do remember I wrote that sort of seven-page or so short story called Sole Survivor. And then my recollection is the next thing I worked on after that was really the geography. So I kind of came up with the idea of those two islands with sort of two different complexes of buildings on them, and then the kind of subway system that connected them. And probably it was really the puzzles that then came third. The idea of Floyd as a main non-player character was definitely part of the idea really from the very beginning. And I think a lot of that had sort of come out of playtesting Zork 1 and playtesting Deadline, playtesting Starcross, where those games had a lot of characters in them. And because of that and you know the size of the games in those days was incredibly limited like Planetfall was I think about 108 kilobytes the total size of the executable just really limited on everything the number of objects the amount of text and so by having a number of characters it meant that each one of those characters had to be that much kind of less deep and less interesting. And I thought, if I just focus on one other or one main non-player character, I’d be able to make that character a little deeper and a little more interesting.

Stay Forever: Writing interactive fiction at that point at Infocom essentially meant writing code, right? So how did this work, and how difficult was that for you?

Steve Meretzky: Sure, it meant writing code, but it was a very high-level language. It was really very friendly to learn. I mean, if you had any programming background at all, it really wasn’t that hard to pick up. The really complex parts of the program were stuff that I didn’t touch, such as the parser. And writing the game-specific stuff, like the characters and the rooms and the objects, the takeable objects and the fixed objects, and the actions and the reactions that the game would give you to your interactions with them, that really wasn’t very hard to pick up.

Stay Forever: Did you learn on the fly or did somebody take the time to coach you through or help you in any way?

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, pretty much it would have been Mark doing the coaching, but it wasn’t that much coaching because if any of the listeners are curious, I’m sure you can find pieces of Infocom code online. In fact, I think the entire Infocom code lives in a repository on GitHub and can probably be found if you poke around on the internet. But if you look at it, it’s pretty readable and pretty easy to kind of figure out what’s going on when you look at the code for an Infocom game.

Stay Forever: And if I understood you correctly, you were implementing the game on a terminal that was connected to that, the DEC20 mainframe computer, right?

Steve Meretzky: Yes, yes. The terminal is called the VT100. And yeah, the mainframe was a DEC20, Digital Equipment Corporation. I would still say to this day, the keyboard of that VT100 is my favorite keyboard that I’ve ever used.

Stay Forever: Why is that?

Steve Meretzky: I don’t know, just, you know, the feel of it, the sound of the keys clicking and clacking, it just was a perfect keyboard, and no keyboard since then has felt quite as perfect to me.

Stay Forever: Infocom at that point had its own interpreter and language, but there’s one thing for these early games, which we are not entirely sure of where this is coming from, and this applies to Planetfall as well, because it says on a game box that it is an interlogic game. Can you help us understand what that term meant?

Steve Meretzky: Oh, that was just some stupid term that marketing came up with. I mean, obviously, there were a number of companies that were making text adventures in those days. And while ours were certainly the most sophisticated, marketing wanted something that would sort of set ours apart. And interlogic was the term that they came up with, some made-up, trademarkable word that they’d be able to slap on the box and make it look like it was special. And I mean, they were special, but they weren’t special because of the word interlogic.

Stay Forever: I see. Well then, I’d say let’s talk about specific design decisions that went into Planetfall. I mean, there are a couple of things which stand out also in light of Infocom’s portfolio at that point in time. And let’s start with the survival mechanic. So the game tracks hunger and thirst, fatigue and the overall health, and our protagonist has to eat and drink and sleep as they die. So why did you put that into the game?

Steve Meretzky: Well, from a narrative point of view, it was a survival game. You were sort of crash-landed on this planet where all the residents were in suspended animation because a horrible disease had been unleashed, and all the residents went into suspended animation so that computerized systems could search for a cure for the disease. But of course, now that you’re there on the planet, you’ve contracted it and you’re getting progressively sicker, and having to eat, having to sleep, all those just sort of went along with adding at least a little bit of very similar to the idea of surviving in a hostile environment.

Stay Forever: So you wanted to add a bit of urgency for the player?

Steve Meretzky: Well, certainly. I mean, the Zork games, they really had no urgency at all. You could take as long as you wanted to solve the game. The idea with Planetfall was, no, you’ve crash-landed on this planet and there are sort of events going on, which will eventually lead to your death, not to mention the death of the planet itself. And so it was meant to be kind of a narrative urgency, but that would also carry over into the mechanics of the game. Certainly Deadline had already come out in that. Even probably more so given that you had exactly 12 hours to solve the murder or lose the game.

Stay Forever: And do you think in hindsight that the systems that you implemented for the survival part were effective?

Steve Meretzky: I think so. I mean, certainly it would take at least a few days of game time to solve the game, by which point you would be starting to get sick and you’d be running out of food. And I think it would sort of get that sense of urgency across. Another system that was new to Planetfall was in the Zork games, every move was one move, but there would just be a move counter that would go up by one every time you input a sentence into the game. In Deadline, same thing, only it was one minute instead of one move or one turn. In Planetfall, what I wanted was different things to take different amounts of time. Again, I thought that would kind of feed into the sense of realism of being in this survival situation. So, walking a short distance might only take one tick, and walking a long distance might take 20 ticks. Or doing a complicated action might take five ticks, while doing a simple action like just picking something up would take one tick. Those kinds of things. And that required a bit of an overhaul of the system in order to support that.

Stay Forever: That’s also on our list. However, the way that you implemented it is not like in Deadline with time on the clock, but with a new timescale with crons and millicrons. Well, actually, it’s only millicrons in the game. And we felt that was a bit strange because it actually obfuscates how much time has passed. So one would have to calculate in one’s head with the help of the manual how many millicrons are the equivalent of a minute. So why not just put hours and minutes there?

Steve Meretzky: Sure, my thinking was that it just seemed more kind of exotic and science-fiction-y to have a different time scale. If it made your life harder as a player, well, screw you. I think it’s a good idea and I’m gonna do it.

Stay Forever: We had speculated that you simply tampered with the move system in a way and that it couldn’t really replicate hours and minutes and you just had to have an intermediate system like the millicrons, but that was not the case.

Steve Meretzky: No, I mean, I’m sure we could have easily adapted that system to hours and minutes.

Stay Forever: The game might be renamed to “Red Herring:  The Game”, because there are many, many false leads. We had these discussions and we were speculating, oh, when I go there, I will solve that. But oh, no, no, I’m done. We’re through already so why did you put so many false leads and so many useless items? Let’s remember there was a helicopter that bothered me greatly as I couldn’t use it.

Stay Forever: And of course the dark rooms and there was no way to ever get any light but again it was sort of an attempt to make the game a little more realistic i mean it always bothered me a little in particularly the Zork games kind of how pat it was and how every single object in the environment would curiously get used by the end of the game. It just made it seem much more like a game rather than like a real environment. And that was really it. It was just, well, if you really were surviving a wreck on this planet, would every single object you find have one use? No, of course not. So that’s really where it came from.

Stay Forever: But that’s something that you changed in your later games. In Stationfall, for instance, that’s toned down with the red herrings. There are still useless items there, but not nearly as many as in Planetfall. So you must have reconsidered at some point.

Steve Meretzky: Well, it certainly got some negative reactions. But also, I mean, the thing with every red herring is, as I said, everything I had to work with was just so incredibly limited. And a red herring basically uses up one of the 256 objects as one of the limits. An object would include every room, every character, everything you could refer to, whether it was takeable or not, like a fireplace or the ocean. Every single one of those was one of your 256 objects. And so red herrings were somewhat antithetical to the idea of trying to be as efficient as possible with those very limited resources.

Stay Forever: I find your reasoning around the red herrings in Planetfall fascinating, because if I understood you correctly, Steve, you were coming from thinking about the game world, having a realistic sense of the game world, and not from the point of view of player experience. So you were essentially designing a world, a playfield, so to speak, and were not so much thinking about how players would feel as they venture through that playfield.

Steve Meretzky: I think that’s accurate. I think that probably indicates to a large extent my kind of newness as a game creator that I wasn’t yet as good at sort of putting myself in the role of the player as opposed to the role of the game writer.

Stay Forever: That’s a hard thing for everyone still today. Let’s talk about Floyd you said that he was there from the beginning in your mind, in your seven-page story, perhaps even. How did you design his personality, his role in the game?

Steve Meretzky: You know, that’s really kind of lost in the mists of time. I don’t really recall that much thought that went into it. I probably decided a robot was better because a robot was sort of an easier character than a human or human-equivalent type character in terms of being believable, in terms of having a more limited set of responses or reactions to anything that the player did. And in terms of his personality, I’m not really sure where that came from either. I mean, like I remember one tester of Planetfall saying to me, “oh, you must have like eight-year-old kids of your own because that’s what Floyd seems like.” And at the time, I didn’t have any kids, so that certainly wasn’t it. Actually, one source, I think one inspiration was in one of Robert Heinlein’s books, Red Planet. There’s a character called a Martian bouncer named Willis. He’s just sort of a pet that one of the main characters in the book has. He’s sort of wild and irrepressible and a little bit parrot-like in terms of repeating things that he hears and stuff like that. But years later, I think in rereading Red Planet, I was like, “hmm, I definitely see a lot of similarities between Willis and Floyd” and kind of think there might have been some influence there.

Stay Forever: So the fact that Floyd, both in size and in personality, is childlike, that was not by design. That was basically an accident.

Steve Meretzky: I think I was just trying to come up with a character who would be fun and interesting. And that’s just the way he came out. but I don’t really recall a lot of thought going into it.

Stay Forever: Interesting. The Greybox release of Planetfall includes some quotes from press and players, including a quote from Dick33, physicist from Australia. He wrote, “This was definitely the most enjoyable and emotional game I have ever played. I have never wept at the computer before.” Dick33 is, of course, referring to Floyd’s sacrifice. We’re assuming that this was a fairly typical reaction, was it? What kind of feedback did you get regarding that scene?

Steve Meretzky: Oh, yeah, I mean, that’s definitely typical. I mean, the sort of big post-release article was the Planetfall cover story in Softline magazine. Which was a second magazine started by the same people who’d started Soft Talk, which was kind of the Apple-focused magazine, where Soft Line was games, but not just focused on Apple, but focused on games across all PCs. And they did a cover story on Planetfall where the entire cover was all text, and it was just Floyd’s death scene. And I was kind of very mixed emotions about that. Big spoiler. Well, very nice that they’re giving it a cover story, but yeah, very worried about what a huge spoiler it was. But yeah, definitely after the game came out and, you know, for the many years since then, any number of people have come up and talked about how they cried at that point in the game.

Steve Meretzky: And what was also interesting is a number of other people who’ve said to me, “oh, I didn’t cry then but in fact until that point I thought Floyd was a little bit kind of annoying and thought good riddance and then when he was gone all of a sudden I realized I was missing him it seemed like like there was this hole in the game or this void in the game when players reacted that way and magazines covered it how was that feeling was this regarded by your peers at Infocom as a success like creatively or wasn’t it noticed that much you.

Steve Meretzky: Know I guess I’d say no one was too surprised I mean I think that’s kind of how we expected people to react I mean the idea that Floyd was going to die was also kind of very early in my thinking about the game kind of as soon as I had said, okay, you know, I want to put all my character resources into a single NPC so that I could make him more interesting. And then almost my second thought after that was, okay, once you’ve done that, what’s the best way to get a payoff from that? And my thought was, well, the best way to get a payoff from that is to have that character die so that there’s a character who you’ll be emotionally tied to, emotionally invested in. And that’s certainly the most kind of emotional and narrative bang for the buck that you can get is a character’s death.

Stay Forever: But in order for that to work, players first have to be emotionally invested in that character that you’re going to kill off.

Steve Meretzky: Sure, which is why it happens quite late in the game.

Stay Forever: So apparently lots of people were invested in Floyd. And I wonder, what’s your take on why? Why is Floyd an effective character?

Steve Meretzky: Well, I think as we talked about earlier, I mean, he sort of has this childlike enthusiasm and he’s a little bit funny, he’s a little bit wise-cracky. He got sort of progressively funnier over the course of working on the game. I don’t think he was really intended to be as kind of a comic relief character as he was but people would keep suggesting things like when you save the game Floyd would say, “oh are we going to do something dangerous now?” you know, which is sort of like breaking the fourth wall. And those were the sorts of little tidbits of humor around Floyd that kind of really accrued over the course of the many months of writing the game and testing the game. It’s pretty interesting to go back and look at all the code associated with Floyd now. I can take it and print it out. And the definition of lines of code doesn’t mean too much in ZIL because you can kind of put line breaks wherever you want. They don’t really matter in terms of interpreting the code. But, you know, I could take all the code related to Floyd and print it out, and it’s about seven pages of printer paper. That’s not a lot. And I think most people have this memory of Floyd that’s much deeper than the actual text that appeared in Planetfall, because over the course of many tens of hours, I think they just sort of mentally fleshed him out into an even deeper character than I had written.

Stay Forever: I agree. That is certainly what happened to me. And I think that’s an amazing achievement. I mean, the sacrifice scene, I have to say, it worked very well for me, not just because of Floyd as a character, but also because it’s pretty well written. But it also works well because the game has earned it. It has built up to it. As I mentioned, Floyd’s sacrifice would be meaningless if we didn’t care for him. Planetfall makes us care through a string of subtle, small interactions and vignettes that emphasize Floyd’s personality. As you mentioned, He’s naive, he’s childlike, good-natured, trusting. So it’s hard not to like Floyd because he’s just so innocent. But at the same time, the simple fact that he occasionally leaves and returns. Also, that he comments on situations, that helps establish that he has a mind of his own and that he’s more than just a sidekick who tags along. He seems alive within the confines of a video game at that point in time. And this feeling of him being alive is important because when the time comes for him to make a choice, we understand that it’s indeed his choice and not ours. And of course, Floyd is not just a narrative element, he’s an interactive element. Even though the interactiveness is very, very, very limited in Planetfall, it’s still there. And we can and must involve Floyd in our adventure, which again brings us closer to him. And I mean given the limitations of the medium at the time you mentioned especially the limitations in disk space you didn’t have much to work with and thus Floyd and Planetfall is kind of an exercise in narrative minimalism and to me, that is astonishingly effective. I think it’s a wonderful achievement.

Steve Meretzky: Well, I guess I would just attribute it to beginner’s luck.

Stay Forever: It was a clever take to make it a child and a robot. I feel that is the base of its success as a narrative device because this was the first time I felt a character in a text adventure not being random, even though he is. He leaves at random intervals and says random things, but he feels more alive than, say, Gandalf in The Hobbit or the thief in Zork or something. Because they feel truly random. And this character, because he’s a child, it’s easier to interpret something that isn’t some limited scope of emotion when you have a robot or a child. So that worked very well. But that being said, you know, you do this whole build-up through the game and the player gets invested and then you kill the character and get all this payoff, and that is great. And then he’s alive again. I felt a little bit cheated.

Steve Meretzky: In those days, basically, we had a word for the ending of every adventure game, which was “cheering elves,” which really goes back to the original adventure. At the end of the game, everything gets resolved and wrapped up in a happy bow and it was sort of considered a game can’t have an unhappy ending. It was only a year after that that Infocom made a game called Infidel about a treasure hunter looting a pyramid, a sort of Indiana Jones-type character. And the game ends with you finally getting to the heart of the pyramid and discovering the treasure, but also realizing that there’s no way out and you’re trapped with the treasure and you’ve achieved your life’s goal only to it be your death sentence. And oh my God, did people hate that ending.

Stay Forever: Okay, fair enough. So you’ve already described the reactions and the feedback that you got to Floyd as a character and Floyd’s sacrifice. But do you think this had any impact on a larger scale on the way that computer games and storytelling in computer games were handled after that point?

Steve Meretzky: I mean, certainly, Floyd is brought up to this day as, you know, sort of an example of computer games evoking an emotional response in players, but I don’t feel like it necessarily became a template or anything for kind of how to do that. And I think other than, okay, at least there’s a proof point so people can stop saying, hey, is it possible for a game to evoke an emotional response in players? Well, at least, okay, the answer to that is definitely yes. But in terms of like, I don’t know, creating a playbook or a toolbox that other game designers can use to try to achieve the same thing, I don’t really feel like it necessarily had much impact in that way.

Stay Forever: Speaking of user feedback, how many angry letters did you get because of the magnet that scrambles the key cards?

Steve Meretzky: I don’t recall a single one, actually.

Stay Forever: Oh, wow. Okay, players were certainly more tolerant back then, because we were pretty surprised by that when we played it these days.

Steve Meretzky: Certainly players were more tolerant and we were certainly way stupider in terms of as game designers creating puzzles that were essentially unsolvable unless you saved and restored, creating puzzles which were just ridiculously unfair. I mean, going all the way back to the original Adventure where the solution to puzzles was to say these magic words like PLUGH and XYZZY and there was absolutely no way that a player would know to do that other than hacking into the code and finding the words embedded in the code. So in those days we definitely weren’t as good at being fair to the player and because players weren’t as used to being treated fairly they had more tolerance to being treated unfairly.

Stay Forever: Because you didn’t get negative reactions, you did it again in Stationfall. Because why not?

Steve Meretzky: The magnet? I have no recollection of it in Stationfall at all.

Stay Forever: The magnet is back.

Steve Meretzky: Probably as a joke.

Stay Forever: But in terms of difficulty, Infocom even had a rating scale back then for the games from beginner to expert, and Planetfall is rated as a standard level game, which is the second lowest after beginner. And we wondered, how were these ratings determined? And more importantly, did you as the implementer aim for a specific level?

Steve Meretzky: No, not really. They were much more of a marketing thing. They were really meant to be, what game do we want to steer players toward? Zork 1 was the entry-level game for the vast majority of the Infocom player base, and yet it was one of our hardest games. By any reasonable rating system, it shouldn’t have been called a standard game, but it had to be called a standard game because marketing didn’t want to discourage people from starting there. Toward the end of Infocom, there was what marketing referred to as the matrix. Just think of a grid of all the genres and all the difficulty levels. So the difficulty levels were beginner, standard, advanced, and expert, and the genres were fantasy, science fiction, adventure, mystery. That created sort of a four by four grid, so 16 holes, and existing games kind of got slotted into those holes, leaving a few spots without any games in them. And so marketing was very anxious to get an expert level adventure game or an introductory level mystery game or that sort of thing.

Stay Forever: Another element to difficulty pertains to your use of language. I already mentioned that I found that the sacrifice scene for Floyd is particularly well written, and I think a lot of Planetfall and also Stationfall has beautiful prose. Even though we’re not native English speakers, we consider ourselves fairly adept in the English vocabulary, but Planetfall and Stationfall were surprisingly challenging in that regard. The language of both of these games is pretty sophisticated at times, and it contains words that we had never seen or heard before, something like an annunciator or a collator. And both of these words were not just used descriptively, but in such a way that we thought they might be significant, and so we had to look them up. So back then I guess people would have looked in a dictionary but I assume that the average US American also wouldn’t know what an annunciator is, for instance, so I guess my question is who were you writing for?

Steve Meretzky: I was probably first writing for me and, you know, second writing for kind of the other people at Infocom. At that point in the early to mid-80s, the people who owned computers tended to be the upper middle class sort of professionals, techies themselves, sort of high-earning professionals, lawyers and doctors and the like, and probably were more likely to have a bigger vocabulary. But I certainly don’t recall ever worrying about it. Like you said, you know, I mean, if you come across a word you don’t know, that’s what dictionaries are for, right? But the other thing you didn’t mention is in Planetfall in particular, there was the alien language, which was basically just a very phonetic form of English, which, you know, just sort of curious what your reaction as a non-English speaker was to trying to make sense of that.

Stay Forever: Chris didn’t mind much and Gunnar of hated it because he felt it hard to parse at first glance, so he had to sit and, you know, like squint and go through. For non-English-speakers it is distracting and kind of like a barrier between player and game.

Steve Meretzky: I’m not surprised that that was your reaction too, because I was sort of intended to be your reaction even for native English speakers. So I don’t think I was at all thinking about, oh my God, how are people for whom English is only a second language going to deal with this?

Stay Forever: We didn’t mind it too much because it was part of the world-building. The language was there for a reason. It was intended to signify that this is a civilization which had developed differently. For that purpose, it was fine, also because it was applied rather consistently. But yeah, you had to wade through quite a lot of text in that way. So we understand that it can get tedious after a while. But there’s another small thing that we noticed. And earlier in our conversation, when you described the punch cards, you did it using the imperial system. However, in Planetfall and Stationfall, most of the metrics are using the metric system. So stuff like meters, centimeters, liters, etc. And we thought that was pretty unusual for a US-American game. Why did you do that?

Steve Meretzky: Well, I mean, I’ve always thought the metric system makes so much more sense than the English system and that eventually it will take over and certainly, you know, 100,000 years from now, or whenever Planetfall is set, it probably seemed inconceivable to me that the English system would still be around.

Stay Forever: So it’s a prediction about the future. Okay, I understand.

Stay Forever: But again, it was more important for you to build that world in a consistent way than to think about how your user base would react to that. And also accept that they might be stumped when they read, okay, this is so-and-so many centimeters long.

Steve Meretzky: You know, I think everyone, even in the US, or at least almost everyone has at least a rough sense of what a meter is and a centimeter. I don’t think there was anything in the game where it was really vital that you know exactly how big or how far something was.

Stay Forever: True. Let’s leave the game proper and go to the rest of the design. The game has “feelies” as it was becoming usual for Infocom games. How did the process of creating that work for Planetfall?

Steve Meretzky: At that point in time, we didn’t have an internal group to do that. We used an external agency to do it. Essentially, there’d just be a kickoff meeting where we’d show them the game, and some game writers kind of went in and said, “I’ve written the game, you take care of the packaging.” But I was much more holistically kind of interested in being involved in all aspects. And so I sort of came in already with, okay, I want there to be a diary, and here’s the first draft of it. And of course the disc. And anyway, they came back with their idea that the original packaging was not the great pinstripe packaging. It was a much larger package as they had to be in those days because some of the early PCs had eight-inch floppy disks, eight-inch being…

Stay Forever: What’s that in the metric system?

Steve Meretzky: Like 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters.

Stay Forever: Huge.

Steve Meretzky: Huge. And yeah, so the package has to be much larger in those early days. And so they came up with the idea for a package which basically would be this very, you know, sort of stuffy rules-based stellar patrol issued folio in which you were had completely disregarded all the rules and were putting all these random other things in the pockets that were supposedly intended only for these other items under penalty of death. And they also came back with the cover art, or at least the idea for the cover art of the stellar patrolman in helmet and spacesuit carrying the mop and bucket. And they also completely rewrote the diary. Basically, they had taken what I had written, which was like a page and a quarter, and blown it out to eight pages. And, you know, I felt really kind of moved away from the picture I had of the background of the player character and so we had a lot of pretty contentious back and forth about that and, you know, ended up with a compromise somewhere in between my initial version and their much longer version.

Stay Forever: The writing style, the prose of the materials in the box as well as in the game to me sounded a little bit influenced by Harry Harrison, the “Stainless Steel Rat”. Is that something you might remember, or am I on the wrong track here?

Steve Meretzky: I certainly had read the Stainless Steel Rat by that point, but I don’t really recall that being an influence. I would have thought Hitchhiker’s would have been a bigger influence. But again, I couldn’t even tell you what of all the text around the packaging I wrote versus what creative agency wrote. Probably a lot of it was just back and forth. They’d do a draft and I’d rewrite it and they’d rewrite it and I’d rewrite it.

Stay Forever: Let’s talk a bit about the version history of Planetfall. The game exists in four different versions, and I’m not talking about versions for different computer platforms or box versions. I’m talking about version numbers. So it starts with version 20, and I think the highest one is 37. There are small differences between these versions. So obviously the game must have been updated throughout its lifespan. And it seems that was common practice at Infocom because most of the Infocom adventures of that era have different versions. But can you help us understand the process? At what point and why was a game updated to a new version?

Steve Meretzky: As we mentioned earlier, the testing before an Infocom game went out was not that rigorous compared to what we do nowadays. For games that I work on, the testing was frighteningly minimal and the games were hugely complicated. I mean, there were so many different things that you could try doing and so many different combinatorials. Right. And so inevitably the game would go out and there would be bugs in addition to working on whatever your current game was you’d also get bug reports for all of your previous games right and you’d fix them and every now and then kind of right away if the bug was a bad one or just periodically if there were a number of minor bugs that had accrued you’d make a new version of the game. And then that version would essentially sit there on the Deck 20, right? And then one of two things would happen. So Infocom would order 10,000 copies of Zork 1 for the Apple II, and then those would all get sold out and they would need to reorder more. And so they would reorder more using whatever the latest version of the game was. And so those first 10,000 versions of the game on the Apple II might have been version X, but now when they needed to reorder more, that would now be version Y. And then the second thing was new microcomputers were coming out constantly during this period. You know, every few months, Atari or Amiga or DEC or, you know, TI or IBM would just release a new PC. So we’d have to create new disks for that new PC, even if the game was two or three or five years old. And so when a new PC came out, the micro group who was in charge of doing that would write an interpreter, which was the piece that would basically take the machine-independent zip file and make it run on that new PC. And then the production group would say, okay, now we need to order disks for the Amiga. And what is the current version of Zork 1? What is the current version of Planetfall? What is the current version of Deadline? So that’s how these newer versions, sort of less buggy versions of the game kind of got out into the wild.

Stay Forever: So that meant that an implementer like yourself would periodically return to your old games to update them?

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, quite frequently. Yeah, I would say probably rare for more than a week to go by where I wouldn’t jump into an old game and fix some bug. And sometimes it wasn’t just fixing a bug. Here’s a good example: All the common words in Infocom games have an abbreviation. All the directions certainly can be abbreviated to a single letter. And at some point fairly early on we were like, “again” is one of the most common words that people type that couldn’t be abbreviated to A because A is a word in English. So we said, what if we abbreviated it to G? And everyone loved that and so as new versions of older games started going out we would put the abbreviation G in for again. So they were more like upgrades to the latest standards and practices.

Stay Forever: Sort of like patches, so to speak.

Steve Meretzky: Yeah.

Stay Forever: This was a success, obviously, creatively. And was it a success commercially as well?

Steve Meretzky:: Reasonably. I mean, it sold probably about a hundred thousand copies in its first year, which sounds like next to nothing by today’s standards. But the third game that I did, Hitchhiker’s Guide, sold about 250,000 copies during its first year. And that was enough to make it number one on the bestseller list for like 11 straight months. So, I mean, 100,000 was pretty good. It wasn’t as good as Hitchhiker’s. It wasn’t as good as Zork, but it was still pretty good.

Stay Forever: So it was successful enough for you to continue. You have to create more games. The games you created in the next few years, all, perhaps not all, but most of them have very high-level concepts and elaborate mechanics that far exceed Planetfall, which is, compared to games like A Mind Forever Voyaging, a relatively simple game. Would you say this reflects your progress as a designer, that you had more confidence in more complex things, or was it more like you tailored a mechanic to a certain topic?

Steve Meretzky: I would say the former. Plus, specifically in the case of A Mind Forever Voyaging, it was because Infocom, with that game, rolled out a new development system, which greatly increased the resources that we as game writers had at our disposal. So it increased the minimum memory required from 32K to 64K, and it increased the number of objects, which I mentioned was one of the really restrictive restrictions that we had in the early development system. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, the limit went from 256 to basically a ridiculously large number. I think it was whatever 256 squared is. So more than I would ever need to worry about using up. So it was, you know, sort of partly my ambition and partly the newly opened-up resources because of that upgrade to the development system.

Stay Forever: After Planetfall, you made a number of unique and ambitious games like, you already mentioned Hitchhiker’s Guide, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. And then in 1987, you decided to do a sequel to Planetfall, which was at this point five years old. So it was basically old news. What prompted you to return to that universe?

Steve Meretzky: Well, the idea of doing a sequel had been floating around on my list of potential projects for all that time since Planetfall. And I simply hadn’t wanted to do it as much as I had wanted to do A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses. But, you know, sort of having gotten those out of the way and nothing in particular that seemed like a better idea having come up in the meantime, then it essentially just became the best current idea.

Stay Forever: But it was not like you were driven by public opinion or the marketing department, which said, we want to have a sequel.

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, I think if the marketing department had had their say, I probably would have done it sooner. But yeah, by the time Stationfall came out in ‘87, the signs of the death of the text adventure were already quite apparent. The size of the market was shrinking steadily, and the number of people kind of moving from playing text adventures over to graphic adventures was accelerating.

Stay Forever: When you did Stationfall, it was, again, especially compared to the games that you did before, a pretty streamlined experience.

Steve Meretzky: Well, once again, went back to using the older development system, so certainly for the last time, went back to the smaller game but the more onerous restrictions. Partly that was because it meant a larger market. The newer development system, the one that was used for A Mind Forever Voyaging, we called it Interactive Fiction Plus. And only, I don’t remember the exact number, but let’s say roughly half of the PCs out there in the installed base of PCs were powerful enough to play an Interactive Fiction Plus game, whereas close to 100% of them could play the older development system. So part of it was to reach more of the market, but part of it was also, you know, I wanted it to be a relatively less ambitious game just for the ease of getting it out in nine or ten months.

Stay Forever: You had been working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s Guide game. Then Douglas Adams worked on a second game for Infocom, Bureaucracy, which I think ultimately came out shortly before Stationfall came out. Those are different games, but they share a common theme in that they both satirize bureaucracy. Was there some kind of cross-pollination there?

Steve Meretzky: Not really. I mean, obviously, Planetfall also satirized bureaucracy, and certainly it wasn’t as much the core of either Stationfall or Planetfall as much as it was the core of Bureaucracy. Yeah, so I’d say that’s really more coincidence than anything.

Stay Forever: When you made Stationfall, you not only returned to the universe, but you had to return to a place where you were successful with a narrative device. So there was pressure to replicate the scene. How did you work with that?

Steve Meretzky: You know, certainly moving it from planetside to spaceside was a good change in terms of keeping the same universe but allowing me to have a very different environment than that in the first game. The problem with a planet-based environment, I mean, it wasn’t too bad in Planetfall because there were really just the two islands and that was all of the planet surface that wasn’t flooded. But in general, when you have any game set on a planet, it’s always very tough to rein in the environment, right? I mean, you can’t simulate a whole planet, and so you constantly have to come up with dopey reasons why the player can’t go in this direction or that direction. The space station was great because it’s, by definition, a very limited environment that’s easy to simulate.

Stay Forever: Floyd is back in Stationfall, and Planetfall was beloved and remembered for the emotional impact that it had, in particular because of Floyd. How difficult was it for you to repeat or even top the emotional impact this time in Stationfall?

Steve Meretzky: Also on the one hand, I had the benefit of being able to start with an already written character and, you know, just sort of ported all that code over as a starting point. But then there was the tricky element in Stationfall of Floyd increasingly falling under the influence of this evil computer and so his personality changed gradually over the course of the game. And so that was a real challenge to introduce those changes in a way that was gradual and felt increasingly menacing and created the kind of mood I was going for.

Stay Forever: Was it clear to you that you wanted to kill him off again this time?

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, that was pretty much… Well, you know, so kind of my thinking was, okay, I don’t want him to just die again, like in Planetfall, because that would just be a repeat of what’s already been done. And so I was like, okay, how could I take that to the next level? And my thought about taking it to the next level was to set up a situation where, not only does he die, but in order to win the game, you have to kill him. And so that was tricky to kind of create a narrative where killing him was the right thing to do rather than what obviously seems like the wrong thing to do.

Stay Forever: Again, I mean, this is very well thought out and worked well. And this time you’re not bringing Floyd back; you’re introducing a replacement character, so to speak, in Oliver, which is a much more, in my personal opinion, much more tasteful way to treat the situation and also a smarter way. And I found that a very satisfying resolution.

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, I mean, that’s probably a sign of more maturity in me as a game designer and game writer than the ending of Planetfall.

Stay Forever: On a side note, there are books about both games named Planetfall and Stationfall respectively, and they play after the events of Stationfall and Oliver is the sidekick there of the main character who has already survived Planetfall and Stationfall. Do you know why that decision was made?

Steve Meretzky: Essentially, Infocom just signed a deal with a publisher to have them hire science fiction writers to write books set in Infocom’s universes. I saw the manuscript for the book before it was published and pretty much hated it and kind of told the publisher so, but we had no creative control over them.

Stay Forever: There are two specific things that we’d like to ask you, Steve. And the first is, we’ve been mentioning that there are lots of false leads and red herrings in Planetfall and much less so in Stationfall. But there’s one thing that made us wonder: When we’re starting the game, we have three forms in our inventory. And we’re using all of them in the course of the game, even the early game, except for one, the mission completion form. But there’s a slot in the Starship where we’re starting on, the SPS Duffy, where this could be fed into this form, but of course we can’t yet because we haven’t accomplished our mission yet. Then there’s the main quest on the station, and a large part of that revolves around finding fuel cells for our space truck in order to possibly return to the Duffy. And this all kind of looks like you had originally planned for the player to return to the Duffy and end the mission there. Or did you?

Steve Meretzky: Maybe. I really don’t remember at all.

Stay Forever: Too long ago then. The second thing is also a very peculiar thing. Stationfall has this moment where you enter the dining area on the station for the first time and there on the table sits a single cup of coffee still steaming. If you drink that coffee you die; it’s poisoned. So we must assume that it was put there by the station’s malevolent machines potentially as a trap for humans. And that made us wonder about your relationship with coffee. Is a cup of steaming hot coffee irresistible to you?

Steve Meretzky: Uh, no, I’m more of a tea drinker than a coffee drinker.

Stay Forever: So it’s more like an indication that you hate coffee and that’s why it’s poisonous.

Steve Meretzky: I think you might be reading a little too much into it.

Stay Forever: Fair enough. It just stood out to us because it was such an odd thing to have a poisoned cup of coffee in the cafeteria. But anyway.

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, I mean, I don’t recall it specifically, but yeah, I think your theory is probably right, that it was that the evil entity had basically reprogrammed the food dispensing machines to poison all the food, and that’s why the station is depopulated.

Stay Forever: I mean, maybe it just stood out to us because we sometimes feel that, or often actually feel that, the personality of the person or persons creating a game impacts the game. And sometimes designers put something of themselves into the games. And we wondered, maybe that is an artifact, that cup of coffee that tells us something about Steve Meretzky. Or maybe there are other things in Planetfall and Stationfall which would indicate that Steve Meretzky’s personality is represented in some way in these games.

Steve Meretzky: Yeah, I think probably with coffee it’s just, what is the thing that you normally go to a galley for? You know, you take a coffee break, you get coffee. What’s the proverbial thing that people meet around in the office? They meet around the coffee machine.

Stay Forever: Yeah, you may not have given this much thought, but we thought for hours what the coffee meant and why it sat there and who put it there? Were there humans alive? Is this a trap? So we’re just reflecting that to you, our play experience.

Steve Meretzky: That’s wonderful, though.

Stay Forever: Stationfall has footnotes, which are self-referential. You’re even referencing yourself as the person who came up with the footnotes in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So we felt if something like that was in the game…

Steve Meretzky: Right, yeah, that was just such a fun feature in Hitchhiker’s. I just was too tempted to not repeat it.

Steve Meretzky: Okay, then one more small thing that maybe you can help clear up, because we found that the only legal way to play Planetfall these days is by buying the Zork Anthology, because that contains all of the Zork games, obviously, but it also contains Planetfall, surprisingly enough. Do you know why that is?

Steve Meretzky: This is from the App Store?

Stay Forever: That is from gog.com, so from a digital storefront. But the Zork Anthology originally was a boxed edition, which Activision brought out in the 90s, and it’s just a digital equivalent of that. So back in that day, they put all of the Zork games in a box, plus Planetfall. And we thought, why on earth Planetfall?

Steve Meretzky:: Oh, I bet I know why. So basically, and a lot of this I only know apocryphally, but after Activision shut Infocom down, they produced several more games under the Infocom name, even though they were produced by Activision out in California. One was Return to Zork, and then Zork Grand Inquisitor, and there was a third one.

Stay Forever: Nemesis?

Steve Meretzky: Nemesis, thank you. And around that time I was talking to Activision about doing a third Planetfall game. And, you know, did a lot of design work on it. And, you know, they never got to the point of moving it into production. But I bet they released the Zork games and Planetfall because those were the Infocom IPs that they were sort of actively working on in terms of trying to make new games.

Stay Forever: Ah, I see. That would be a good explanation.

Steve Meretzky: Yeah. I thought that there was a Lost Treasures app on the App-Store that let you play all the old games.

Stay Forever: Not anymore. It’s been taken down. It hasn’t been updated, and so it’s not compatible anymore with modern phones. The final question would be, Steve, you have been creating a lot of games, so you have a large ludography that spans decades. What do Planetfall and Stationfall mean to you in light of your overall work, your overall portfolio?

Steve Meretzky: I mean, certainly the Infocom games in general are the things that I most get asked about, whether by the media, by fans, by other people within the industry… And Planetfall is certainly special being my first game. Also, as we talked earlier, the special place it has as the game that, more than any other game, kind of has the mantle of proving that you can evoke an emotional response in players. I mean, I like every game that I’ve worked on for one reason or another, and I frequently get asked, you know, oh, of all the games you’ve worked on, what’s your favorite? And it’s kind of like asking someone, oh, of all your children, which one is your favorite? You know, I mean, they’re all my favorite. But yeah, I mean, there are certainly a lot of reasons why Planetfall is pretty special in my memory.

Stay Forever: Thank you very much for taking the time. Maybe one last thing before I forget that. Why did you actually leave Infocom?

Steve Meretzky: Oh, well, Activision shut the whole studio down in 1989. Right.

Stay Forever: And you were still there at that point. Okay, that explains that. Okay, also from my side, thank you so much, Steve. This was very insightful, very helpful, it gave us a better understanding of Planetfall and Stationfall, and most importantly, context. And it was just great talking to you.

Steve Meretzky: Likewise. Yeah, very good to meet both of you.

Stay Forever: Thank you. Have a great evening.