4 ms·

Steve Meretzky – Working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide

163 points by Retrogamingpap 2y ago

cornuto 2y ago
I was chuffed to read that Steve's favorite among his many puzzles was the same as my own (Sorcerer's time-travel puzzle).
Retrogamingpap 2y ago
We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. American game designer Steve Meretzky startet his career at Infocom, where he created some of the great adventure classics of the eighties. For instance, it was he who got the task of making the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game together with author Douglas Adams, a game that became a massive bestseller and is still remembered for its great jokes and devilish puzzles.
- nervousvarun 2y ago
  This was such a fun read. The photo of Douglas Adams laying face down is just perfect.
- ghaff 2y ago
  A Mind Forever Voyaging is much overlooked IMO because it's less of a puzzle game. But it has some of the best writing of the Infocom games. Hitchhiker's is hard--maybe too much so but then I mostly struggled with Infocom games a bit absent over the phone hints from Steve :-) The Infocom-oriented cut of @textfile 's Get Lamp documentary is worth a watch. (As is the original cut of course.)
  - kleiba 2y ago
    There was a time where I played that game for days with "Jazz Impressions of New York" by Dave Brubeck (another underrated masterpiece) playing in the background. This was many many years ago, and still the feeling of that time is very present in my mind.
  - mwigdahl 2y ago
    A Mind Forever Voyaging was way ahead of its time.
- skipkey 2y ago
  It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.
- FabHK 2y ago
  FWIW, when you submit an article, you can now also immediately comment on it; that's what the text field is for. (But no need, I think, to copy & paste the first two paragraphs from the article.)
mikepurvis 2y ago
Related reading, Andy Baio's article from 2008 digging into the contents of a hard drive from Infocom: https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...
trevithick 2y ago
> Douglas, procrastinator that he was, was already a year past his deadline for delivering the manuscript for So Long And Thanks For All The Fish to his publisher … and he hadn’t yet written a word. Jesus, I feel anxious just reading that.
- stoneman24 2y ago
  My favourite quote from Douglas Adams “ I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
  - dcminter 2y ago
    I think it's a reworked quote from someone else originally, but I like "Writing is easy - all you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds..."
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  When you’re a professional procrastinator, you get used to the background hum of anxiety in your mind - it becomes little more relevant than a buzzing fluorescent tube over the kitchen table. An annoyance, but not something you particularly feel the need to do anything about. Generally this arises because you’ve procrastinated on so many matters that resolving any one of them simply won’t make a difference, and you know that resolving all of them is an impossibility, particularly those where the deadline has been, gone, had children, and moved to the country in its senescence to spend more time in nature.
  - mckirk 2y ago
    At some point I'll write a better response here to express my gratitude for your comment. Tomorrow, maybe. Or one of these days, anyway.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I used to work with someone (back in Palm Pilot days) who would have a list of something like 100s of overdue ToDo items. He was just terrible at starting and completing tasks. And, yes, you can get to the point where the magnitude of curating and chipping away at your list is so great that it's easier to just put it out of mind.
wazoox 2y ago
Other related reading, the excellent piece from the Digital Antiquarian : https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-adams/ https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-ad...
- noneeeed 2y ago
  That really is an excellent (and rather long) piece. I've often wondered how much of the original HHGTTG radio series was really John Lloyd his producer, who often had no choice but to take what Douglas had produced and bash it into shape to make a workable script. I often wonder what could have been produced if Douglas had just had a little more focus, and whether that might have just taken the edge off his work.
mattbee 2y ago
Here's a great interview with Steve where he goes over his life story & favourite video games https://shows.acast.com/my-perfect-console/episodes/steve-meretszky-interactive-fiction-writer-hitchhikers-guide https://shows.acast.com/my-perfect-console/episodes/steve-me...
mattofak 2y ago
For it's 30th anniversary, the BBC released a free to play version: https://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2game https://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2game It is not easy; but there are hints! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3tmVKGc4dR463kWs0gT1SGT/game-hints https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3tmVKGc4dR463kWs0g...
- rob74 2y ago
  Thanks (bookmarking)! However: We were able to build in a larger, handier interface, with additional keys and functionality, and build in the ability to tweet from the game. I wonder who at the BBC in 2024 thought a tight and (by the sound of it) exclusive integration of the-right-wing-cesspit-formerly-known-as-Twitter would be a good idea?
  - MikeCoats 2y ago
    I think this was released in 2014, not 2024. The original was released in 1984 and those are the notes for the 30th Anniversary Edition. I now feel old. Twitter was still 140 characters when they wrote those notes.
    - rob74 2y ago
      Ah, ok, sorry, my bad - unfortunately I can't delete the comment anymore...
- Towaway69 2y ago
  Has anyone attached an AI to the game and tried to get it to solve the game? ;)
shanusmagnus 2y ago
Is there a place to download the old Infocom games, or play them on the web somehow? HHGTTG was my favorite game, but I never played LGOP or MFV and would like to.
- gramie 2y ago
  All of them are available to download, and many to play in a browser. A Google search will do the trick.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  There's a collection of some of them on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    Or GOG if you prefer: https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology I keep hoping that now that Microsoft owns all of Infocom's legacy they'll do some more interesting packs/anthologies again. Also, it's not the kind of "platform seller, AAA modern stuff" that Xbox Game Pass is known for, but I still like to hope that if some of these games showed up on Xbox Game Pass for PC they'd accidentally blow up on Twitch somewhat the way old PBS shows like Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood did. Get a bunch of people playing old classic games they'd never think to try by making them "What's New on Game Pass" notable.
    - 7thaccount 2y ago
      How do you play Zork on Xbox? Lots of typing using the on screen keyboard? Auto fill for certain things?
      - WorldMaker 2y ago
        That is why I suggested to focus on the "for PC" part of Xbox Game Pass. (Microsoft's sometimes confusing way of naming things strikes again.) Though, Xbox speech-to-text isn't awful, would be a wild way to play Zork. And also, the Xbox does support connecting any USB keyboard.
jvan 2y ago
The video for MC Frontalot's "It is Pitch Dark" has a cameo by Meretzky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE
- maxwelljoslyn 2y ago
  Thanks for the trivia! I love Frontalot, and this is probably my favorite song by him.
wolfhumble 2y ago
> "Al Vezza, Infocom’s CEO (and someone with no sense of humor whatsoever), was showing him around." Albert Vezza cofounded the World Wide Web Consortium with Tim Berners-Lee, so that is big plus in my book: "So Vezza talked Berners-Lee into coming to MIT, where the two of them cofounded the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, with Berners-Lee as director and Vezza as chair. Under their leadership, what started as a tentative collaboration between MIT and CERN has evolved into a group that spans hundreds of technology companies, laboratories, and research groups around the world. Over the years, W3C members have worked together to flesh out the standards of HTTP and develop others that are now as ubiquitous as they are essential." https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/23/139540/farewell-to-file-clerks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/23/139540/farewell-...
nickdothutton 2y ago
Wonderful memories.
zoky 2y ago
Sadly, the most unrealistic thing about A Mind Forever Voyaging is that in the end, once the evil politician's master plan is revealed, he is disgraced and loses his job. Were it representative of real life, it would become a campaign platform.
jccalhoun 2y ago
Minor spoilers for a game released in 1984.... I played the Hitchhiker's game a couple decades ago and I remember getting stuck at the end because I had dropped something down a grate. Turns out, at least according to this walkthrough I found, that the game is programmed to randomly require an item but if you are missing one it will require whatever item you don't have...
cess11 2y ago
Later Adams played Myst and got interested in game development again, resulting in the rather cute Starship Titanic game. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic
RyanOD 2y ago
It's difficult to put into works what the Infocom games mean to me (and likely many other 50-somethings). So many great memories curled up in a blanket spending hours mapping these games and working out the puzzles. I still play many of them to this day. Thanks for all the memories and endless hours of fun!
ASUfool 2y ago
I found this last year on the Internet Archive and it gives you more insight into what went into the Infocom game than the interview. https://archive.org/details/InfocomCabinetHitchhikersGuide https://archive.org/details/InfocomCabinetHitchhikersGuide

I was chuffed to read that Steve's favorite among his many puzzles was the same as my own (Sorcerer's time-travel puzzle).

Retrogamingpap 2y ago

We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. American game designer Steve Meretzky startet his career at Infocom, where he created some of the great adventure classics of the eighties. For instance, it was he who got the task of making the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game together with author Douglas Adams, a game that became a massive bestseller and is still remembered for its great jokes and devilish puzzles.

nervousvarun 2y ago
This was such a fun read. The photo of Douglas Adams laying face down is just perfect.
ghaff 2y ago
A Mind Forever Voyaging is much overlooked IMO because it's less of a puzzle game. But it has some of the best writing of the Infocom games. Hitchhiker's is hard--maybe too much so but then I mostly struggled with Infocom games a bit absent over the phone hints from Steve :-) The Infocom-oriented cut of @textfile 's Get Lamp documentary is worth a watch. (As is the original cut of course.)
- kleiba 2y ago
  There was a time where I played that game for days with "Jazz Impressions of New York" by Dave Brubeck (another underrated masterpiece) playing in the background. This was many many years ago, and still the feeling of that time is very present in my mind.
- mwigdahl 2y ago
  A Mind Forever Voyaging was way ahead of its time.
skipkey 2y ago
It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.
FabHK 2y ago
FWIW, when you submit an article, you can now also immediately comment on it; that's what the text field is for. (But no need, I think, to copy & paste the first two paragraphs from the article.)

mikepurvis 2y ago

Related reading, Andy Baio's article from 2008 digging into the contents of a hard drive from Infocom: https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...

trevithick 2y ago

> Douglas, procrastinator that he was, was already a year past his deadline for delivering the manuscript for So Long And Thanks For All The Fish to his publisher … and he hadn’t yet written a word. Jesus, I feel anxious just reading that.

stoneman24 2y ago
My favourite quote from Douglas Adams “ I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
- dcminter 2y ago
  I think it's a reworked quote from someone else originally, but I like "Writing is easy - all you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds..."
madaxe_again 2y ago
When you’re a professional procrastinator, you get used to the background hum of anxiety in your mind - it becomes little more relevant than a buzzing fluorescent tube over the kitchen table. An annoyance, but not something you particularly feel the need to do anything about. Generally this arises because you’ve procrastinated on so many matters that resolving any one of them simply won’t make a difference, and you know that resolving all of them is an impossibility, particularly those where the deadline has been, gone, had children, and moved to the country in its senescence to spend more time in nature.
- mckirk 2y ago
  At some point I'll write a better response here to express my gratitude for your comment. Tomorrow, maybe. Or one of these days, anyway.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I used to work with someone (back in Palm Pilot days) who would have a list of something like 100s of overdue ToDo items. He was just terrible at starting and completing tasks. And, yes, you can get to the point where the magnitude of curating and chipping away at your list is so great that it's easier to just put it out of mind.

wazoox 2y ago

Other related reading, the excellent piece from the Digital Antiquarian : https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-adams/ https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-ad...

noneeeed 2y ago
That really is an excellent (and rather long) piece. I've often wondered how much of the original HHGTTG radio series was really John Lloyd his producer, who often had no choice but to take what Douglas had produced and bash it into shape to make a workable script. I often wonder what could have been produced if Douglas had just had a little more focus, and whether that might have just taken the edge off his work.

mattbee 2y ago

Here's a great interview with Steve where he goes over his life story & favourite video games https://shows.acast.com/my-perfect-console/episodes/steve-meretszky-interactive-fiction-writer-hitchhikers-guide https://shows.acast.com/my-perfect-console/episodes/steve-me...

mattofak 2y ago

For it's 30th anniversary, the BBC released a free to play version: https://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2game https://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2game It is not easy; but there are hints! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3tmVKGc4dR463kWs0gT1SGT/game-hints https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3tmVKGc4dR463kWs0g...

rob74 2y ago
Thanks (bookmarking)! However: We were able to build in a larger, handier interface, with additional keys and functionality, and build in the ability to tweet from the game. I wonder who at the BBC in 2024 thought a tight and (by the sound of it) exclusive integration of the-right-wing-cesspit-formerly-known-as-Twitter would be a good idea?
- MikeCoats 2y ago
  I think this was released in 2014, not 2024. The original was released in 1984 and those are the notes for the 30th Anniversary Edition. I now feel old. Twitter was still 140 characters when they wrote those notes.
  - rob74 2y ago
    Ah, ok, sorry, my bad - unfortunately I can't delete the comment anymore...
Towaway69 2y ago
Has anyone attached an AI to the game and tried to get it to solve the game? ;)

shanusmagnus 2y ago

Is there a place to download the old Infocom games, or play them on the web somehow? HHGTTG was my favorite game, but I never played LGOP or MFV and would like to.

gramie 2y ago
All of them are available to download, and many to play in a browser. A Google search will do the trick.
7thaccount 2y ago
There's a collection of some of them on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Or GOG if you prefer: https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology I keep hoping that now that Microsoft owns all of Infocom's legacy they'll do some more interesting packs/anthologies again. Also, it's not the kind of "platform seller, AAA modern stuff" that Xbox Game Pass is known for, but I still like to hope that if some of these games showed up on Xbox Game Pass for PC they'd accidentally blow up on Twitch somewhat the way old PBS shows like Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood did. Get a bunch of people playing old classic games they'd never think to try by making them "What's New on Game Pass" notable.
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    How do you play Zork on Xbox? Lots of typing using the on screen keyboard? Auto fill for certain things?
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      That is why I suggested to focus on the "for PC" part of Xbox Game Pass. (Microsoft's sometimes confusing way of naming things strikes again.) Though, Xbox speech-to-text isn't awful, would be a wild way to play Zork. And also, the Xbox does support connecting any USB keyboard.

jvan 2y ago

The video for MC Frontalot's "It is Pitch Dark" has a cameo by Meretzky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

maxwelljoslyn 2y ago
Thanks for the trivia! I love Frontalot, and this is probably my favorite song by him.

wolfhumble 2y ago

> "Al Vezza, Infocom’s CEO (and someone with no sense of humor whatsoever), was showing him around." Albert Vezza cofounded the World Wide Web Consortium with Tim Berners-Lee, so that is big plus in my book: "So Vezza talked Berners-Lee into coming to MIT, where the two of them cofounded the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, with Berners-Lee as director and Vezza as chair. Under their leadership, what started as a tentative collaboration between MIT and CERN has evolved into a group that spans hundreds of technology companies, laboratories, and research groups around the world. Over the years, W3C members have worked together to flesh out the standards of HTTP and develop others that are now as ubiquitous as they are essential." https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/23/139540/farewell-to-file-clerks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/23/139540/farewell-...

nickdothutton 2y ago

Wonderful memories.

zoky 2y ago

Sadly, the most unrealistic thing about A Mind Forever Voyaging is that in the end, once the evil politician's master plan is revealed, he is disgraced and loses his job. Were it representative of real life, it would become a campaign platform.

jccalhoun 2y ago

Minor spoilers for a game released in 1984.... I played the Hitchhiker's game a couple decades ago and I remember getting stuck at the end because I had dropped something down a grate. Turns out, at least according to this walkthrough I found, that the game is programmed to randomly require an item but if you are missing one it will require whatever item you don't have...

cess11 2y ago

Later Adams played Myst and got interested in game development again, resulting in the rather cute Starship Titanic game. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic

RyanOD 2y ago

It's difficult to put into works what the Infocom games mean to me (and likely many other 50-somethings). So many great memories curled up in a blanket spending hours mapping these games and working out the puzzles. I still play many of them to this day. Thanks for all the memories and endless hours of fun!

ASUfool 2y ago

I found this last year on the Internet Archive and it gives you more insight into what went into the Infocom game than the interview. https://archive.org/details/InfocomCabinetHitchhikersGuide https://archive.org/details/InfocomCabinetHitchhikersGuide