My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin29 Jul 2024

Steve Meretszky, author of interactive fiction (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; A Mind Forever Voyaging).

My guest today is the American video game developer Steve Meretzky. Born and raised in Yonkers, New York, he attended MIT, where he earned a degree in construction management. In 1981, after two years spent working in the construction industry, a friend asked him if he would like to become a tester for Infocom, a publisher that specialised in interactive fiction. He agreed and was soon invited to write a game of his own, the science fiction game Planetfall.

After he included a reference to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the game, my guest was invited to collaborate with Adams in adapting the novel into a best-selling game. In 1988 he wrote A Mind Forever Voyaging, an ambitious and politically charged work that stretched the boundaries of what a video game could do ––and saw him become one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America.

After stints working for Blue Fang Games, Playdom and King, he is currently VP of design at the mobile games company PeopleFun.

LINKS

BBC Documentary from 1985 takes us inside Infocom.

Play 30th Anniversary Edition of Hitchhiker's Guide in your browser.

Google's AI experiment with Zork...

Hire Ed Hawkins to voice your game.

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