2024-07-30
1 小时 18 分钟My guest today is an American video game developer.
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 specialized in interactive fiction.
He agreed and was soon invited to write a game of his own, the science fiction title Planetfall.
After he included a reference to Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the game, my guest was invited to collaborate with Adams in adapting the novel.
Into a bestselling video 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, Fangames, Playdom and King, he is currently VP of Design at the mobile games company People.
Fun.
Welcome, Steve Meretsky.
Thank you, Simon.
So, Steve, yeah, you've worked in the industry for more than four decades now and you've kept up with many of those sweeping changes in how games are made and played.
But I suppose you're most associated with that period that I was describing, the 80s and early 90s, when interactive fiction was so vibrant and creative and expected, I think, to become a kind of parallel industry to books really.
There was lots of investment and all of that, but that never really happened.
And interactive fiction then became a slightly more niche enterprise after that.
What do you put that down to?
Why did that happen?
Well, they were basically a pretty niche product.
I mean, they involved a lot of reading, a lot of typing, a lot of thinking, a lot of puzzle solving.