In this episode:

Jordan interviews the legendary Steve Meretzky, a game designer and producer, best known for creating Infocom games. Steve was recognized as one of PC Gamer’s “Game Gods” and is renowned for his work on beloved text adventures like Zork, Planetfall, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. He’s also held senior creative roles at companies such as King, GSN, and Disney/Playdom. Steve shares wisdom from his long career in the gaming industry, covering everything from IP development, narrative and character design, puzzle creation, and more.

Topics covered:

• Steve's career journey and early days at Infocom
• How to identify if a game project is on track for greatness
• Moderating creative ambition to manage team resources
• The story behind the creation of Leather Goddesses of Phobos
• What should come first, the story or the puzzles in an adventure game?
• Choosing the right IP for a game project
• Steve's thoughts on game writing and character development
• A valuable story about the dangers of not leveraging successes when you have them

For more game industry tips:

• Learn more about Jordan & Bright Black
• Listen on iTunes | Spotify (Support the show and leave a review)
• Visit www.playmakerspodcast.com for the full blog post and more!

Timestamps:

[03:16] Steve’s entry into the game industry and Infocom

[07:05] Writing and designing Planetfall

[10:23] How Planetfall made players cry

[12:30] Identifying a successful game in development

[15:25] Technology challenges and risks: The Unity and Facebook project

[17:14] Balancing creative ambition and resource management

[21:00] Game writing and storytelling: Challenges in nonlinear mediums

[23:12] Her Story and innovative game storytelling

[26:00] Puzzle design in text adventures

[28:44] IP development: The story behind Leather Goddesses of Phobos

[35:25] Leveraging IP and sequels: Mobsters and Gardens of Time

[40:28] Steve’s approach to working with existing IP

Resources & media mentioned in this episode:

Connect with Steve Meretzky:

• LinkedIn

Games & companies mentioned:

• Infocom
• Playdom
• Disney Interactive
• GSN
• King
• Planetfall (Infocom)
• Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Infocom)
• Zork series (Infocom)
• Mobsters (Playdom)
• Gardens of Time (Playdom)
• Her Story (Sam Barlow)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom)
• Blackwood & Bell Mysteries (Playdom)

All right, you ready to dive in?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, I think I will just start. I'll tee it up to you to kind of talk about how you got into the industry, and then we'll just go from there. Okay. Should I, should I do that now? I'll introduce you. I mean, I want to... I'll just say, I'll thank you. And then I'll, I'll kick it off to you. Steve, welcome to Playmakers. Oh my god. Are you kidding me? Hold on.

You are listening to Playmakers, the podcast—the only podcast, the best podcast. I just love saying the word podcast! In this week's episode, I've got an incredible guest with one of PC Gamer's gods of gaming—a god! I don't even believe in God, but I've got a god in this week's episode of Playmakers. I hope you're excited. We are gonna talk all about IP development, text adventures, and much more.

Have you figured out who it is yet? Let's see. It's coming right up, right here, right now on Playmakers.

You can feel the excitement—maybe, maybe a little too much excitement. We've got a great guest this week, someone who is incredibly well known and beloved for their work on famous text adventure games at Infocom: the Planet Falls, the Zorks, the Leather Goddesses of Phobos—which may give away who I'm talking about for many of you.

This guest was named one of PC Gamer's 25 Game Gods, which is a pretty cool title if you can get it. He also worked as a VP of games at King, a VP of creative at GSN, a VP of game design at Playdom/Disney. We talk about some of those experiences and some stories from those years, and many, many other accolades and adventures along the way.

This is also someone who, I’m so lucky to have gotten to know a little bit. And this guest is just like you would imagine him to be if you have played some of the Infocom games. He’s witty, he’s wry, he constantly keeps you on your toes, and it’s just a pleasure to get to know him. I’m so excited to share this interview with him today. So ladies and gentlemen, this week’s guest is the great Steve Meretzky.

Now, before we get into the interview, I just want to invite you to, if you haven’t, make sure you are subscribed to the podcast. If you are enjoying the show, make sure you are letting your colleagues know about it so that they can also benefit from the knowledge and the wisdom that we work hard to bring you on Playmakers. So yeah, subscribe, write a review—all those things, really appreciate it.

And of course, as ever, feel free to reach out to me personally, jordan@brightblack.co,

and let me know what you would love to see more of in the show, what kind of guests you want to have on, what kind of topics you want to have covered. I just love that stuff and I really appreciate it. So you can always email me right there.

Okay, I won’t keep it any longer. Let’s get into the interview with Steve Meretzky.

Steve, welcome to Playmakers. It's great to have you on the show.

And it is a delight to be here.

So just, I wanted to, first of all, we were both cracking up right before we started the interview for unrelated reasons, but Steve always makes me laugh. Steve, tell us a little bit about how you got into and got started in the game industry.

Well, in 1981, which is when I earned my first dollar from the game industry, there weren't really a lot of proven entry points. There certainly were no game programs that were turning out young people primed to work in the game industry. My path was just about everyone in the game industry at that point—sort of unpredictable and unplanned. I happened to know many of the people who founded Infocom just socially from MIT. Most specifically, we were all running the MIT film and lecture program. And so I ended up graduating with a degree in construction management, which is what I did professionally for the first couple of years after I graduated.

And I'd say there were things in my life that I liked less, for example, getting a colonoscopy, but for the most part, it was not fun. It was just really boring. And the people were boring. The work was boring. This was in New York, and it was things like schools, prisons, public buildings. And pretty much the assumption going into every single project was it's going to end in a lawsuit. And pretty much if I had to sum up my job, it was essentially documenting every single freaking little thing that happened in the project to support what would eventually be a court case—basically arguing over the finances of the project once it was completed.

Okay, so it's almost like it was in school. It was more of a design task, planning and kind of putting the pieces together. But then in reality, it was more of like a documentation kind of thing.

Well, it was much more of a cutting-edge planning task in school and about as far as you could get from cutting-edge planning tasks in the field. So anyway, two years of that, and I was so ready to do anything else. At the time, I was sharing an apartment with Mike Dornbrook, who was another one of these people who was involved with the film and lecture program. And he had basically been Infocom's one paid tester. He had an Apple II in our kitchen where he did the testing—this is before Infocom even had an office. And when he wasn't using it, I would sometimes use it to play Zork 1 and then later Zork 2. And of course, these were pre-release versions of the game that were pretty buggy. And just as I was playing for fun, I would write down bugs just as he was doing. Of course, he was getting paid for it and I wasn't.

But then he went off to business school in Chicago, and Mark Blank, who was one of the founders of Infocom—and I guess his title was probably VP of development—yeah, I think that was his title. Anyway, he said, "We just lost our tester. Would you like to be our new tester? You've been doing it on Zork 1 and Zork 2 anyway. And now we have this new game that I'm writing called Deadline." And I said, "Sure." And so basically I took over the Apple II and began testing Deadline. And that was November of '81—that was when I earned my first dollar in the game industry.

And go from testing on the Apple II to writing and designing for it for Infocom.

So I did testing for about a year, and then Mark said, "How would you like to try writing your own game?" I said, "Sure," and I started working on my first game, which ended up being Planetfall. And then for a good chunk of a year...

There's got to be something in between—how did Mark, must have seen something in you?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I'd known him for years by that point, and I guess he thought that I was a creative and/or funny person. But there wasn't a lot of...

That does come through, Steve, very, very, very quickly with you.

I guess I'd say there just wasn't a lot of risk in saying to someone, "Do you want to try writing a game?" I mean, they were one-person efforts. The system, the game writing system, already existed. You could basically say, "Okay, spend a few months doing this. If it's not coming out well, then we've wasted a few months of your time." It's not that big a deal. It's not like we've sunk $10 million into the effort. So I've never really thought that it was that unusual that he said, "Hey, do you want to give it a try?" And in the meantime, I was starting to create the game part-time but continuing to do testing part-time. And that game, as I said, was Planetfall. I started writing it in the fall of '82, and it was released in the fall of '83.

How did you approach writing it? Did Mark give you any mentorship in terms of how to structure this, how to think it through, or was it intuitive for you based on the testing you had done?

Yeah, at that point, Infocom had already published half a dozen games—The Three Zorks, Starcross, Suspended, Deadline. So, I'd played a number of games. I certainly knew the format. I knew the structure of the games well. I picked science fiction as the genre just because that was my personal favorite genre in terms of what I liked to read. And I also wanted kind of a big defining pillar of the game, which was that I wanted there to be one major non-player character.

So the games so far—the Zork trilogy—it had a number of characters: the thief, the wizard, the demon, the dragon, and so on and so forth. But because each game had a number of characters, there wasn’t a lot of attention or resources devoted to each one. And similarly, with Deadline, the first mystery game, there was this whole array of suspects, and there were sort of too many to make each one all that deep. So a pillar for me was that there would be one major non-player character, and because of that, I’d be able to make that character kind of deeper and more interesting. And that character ended up being the robot Floyd.

That's the sidekick?

Yeah.

Yeah, when I was researching for this interview, everyone knows you so well for comedy. But one of the things that came up in that research was that Planetfall was one of the first games, or the first game, that ever made people cry or feel sad. And it was related to that character.

Yeah, which is so odd because almost every game makes me sad. I'm joking, but just when I play so many games and I just see a kind of lack of originality—not pushing the envelope forward in any way—it just sort of makes me sad. So much effort and so many resources were kind of wasted on putting out another clone or another very unimaginative game

Yeah. Okay. Well, I definitely want to talk through IP development with you and kind of get into that before we do. I just want to ask, having seen the industry develop over these many, many years, lots changed, obviously, like for example, how much sort of risk or how much investment upfront people put into games. What are some of the things that you think haven't changed? Principles that have stood the test of time in terms of producing great stuff or succeeding in the industry?

I think a big one is just to be a hit, kind of everything has to go right. There are so many things that go into a game, and not just in development, but in the original concept, in the IP if you have one, in the kind of match between the theme and the mechanic and the target audience and the marketing. And if it's a retail channel, sort of everything that goes into getting the game into the channel and selling it. And of course, if it's a free-to-play game, everything that goes into user acquisition and then live ops of the game, et cetera. And so there are just so many places where a weak link can kind of make the whole chain fall apart, and you really have to kind of hit on every cylinder to be a success. And I think that's what makes game development so hard. There are just so many moving pieces, and you kind of can't screw up a single one of them.

Do you feel like you can tell during a project when it's on track for that sort of thing? Like there's an energy or an excitement that carries through, or is it something that you really don't know until it's out there?

Sometimes you can tell from the very beginning. I think a big kind of clue is when people on the team are playing the game even when they don’t have to. But then there are plenty of cases when it feels like, "Wow, this is great. This is going to be great." A lot of times it’s like the team drinking the Kool-Aid, like everyone just is in love with what they’re working on but is kind of blind to its flaws. Sometimes it’s just things coming out of left field. I mean, a big example is a project that I worked on for two years toward the end of my time at Playdom Disney.

It was a park-building game, so sort of a CityVille-type game, but using Disney park assets. And this was for Facebook, which was a platform that was pretty much 100 percent flash—it wasn’t a Unity platform. Back then, almost no one had Unity on their PC, especially casual gamers, who were the target audience for this. But we also wanted a game that was really technically robust, something more... well, actually, our GM at the time, John Pleasance, put it this way: he said, "It can’t just be CityVille with Disney assets smeared on top of it. It has to be something that really blows people’s socks off."

So we made the decision to build the game in Unity, and Unity at the time was promising a suite of tools that would convert Unity code into Flash code. So we spent—it was supposed to be delivered in maybe a six to 12-month timeframe—and that time came and went, and more months and more months went by. They finally delivered it, and it didn’t do half the stuff that they had originally promised. We had to write a bunch of utilities ourselves, and we finally got the game basically limping in Flash. We did a soft launch in the Philippines, and the performance was so horrible. I cannot describe how horrible it was. The metrics were terrible.

That's something I've seen before, too. Do you remember there was that studio in Canada that sued Epic for not properly delivering on Unreal Engine? This was like a good eight, nine years ago, if not more, maybe GameCube era.

No, I don't recall that.

Yeah, it went to court. I don't know where it ended up. But definitely, this happens when you're trying to bring in new tech.

Yeah, I mean, basically to bring it back full circle, we eventually did a second soft launch in the Philippines in Unity, and the game ran fantastically. For everyone who played the game, the metrics were terrific, except we lost about three-quarters of players on that early screen where it said, "You need to install Unity if you want to play the game," and poof, we lost three-quarters of all players at that point. So economically, the game was just unlaunchable. You can't lose three-quarters of your acquired users at the first step and have a game that's going to be viable in the user acquisition channel. So essentially, we had a game that wasn't launchable in Flash, and it wasn't launchable in Unity. The game was terrific. I mean, everyone agreed, and of course, the metrics of the Unity test sort of showed that had we been able to get the game into people's hands, it would have been a huge success.

One of the reasons this show exists is to help creatives learn enough of what matters in terms of production, business, or marketing to help them have a better chance at addressing some of those pitfalls along the way. Are there any other things that show up for you in terms of things that have caused projects to not be as successful as they could have been creatively, but these other issues get in the way?

I'd say one is moderate your ambition. I mean, it's just so easy to sort of fall in love with every feature and say, "Yes, that makes the game better. Let's include that, let's include that, let's include that." And you keep one-plussing, and it keeps increasing the development effort, and it keeps pushing out your launch date, et cetera. And it's much better to, I'd say, keep a really strict eye on that—what is the MVP? What is the core set of features that we really need to launch with?

And, of course, nowadays, where most projects are live ops anyway, anything that doesn't make it into that initial launch doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen. It can happen later as a post-launch feature or a live event or that sort of thing. But I’ve just seen a lot of projects founder on the one-plussing, and then it just drags down everything because everyone—all your resources, your team—are just stretched too thin. And instead of taking a smaller number of things and making them really, really good, everything ends—or many things end up coming out mediocre.

Yeah. Are there any, are there any frameworks you like to use to kind of keep your eye on what matters and maybe what can be cut or postponed?

Not really. I'm not a big framework guy. I guess I'm somewhat more of a gut guy.

So you just sort of think about what you're going for and kind of compare the option, the feature or the element to that and, and see if it strikes you as kind of a fit?

I certainly like having kind of a document which outlines the vision and outlines the pillars and is something which when someone says, "Hey, it would be really cool if we added this," you can kind of hold it up to that and say, "Does this support one of those pillars or does it support that vision?" Or is this, as nice an idea as it is, as fun as we all agree that would be to have in the game, it's orthogonal, it's sort of secondary.

Yeah, that's great. And I think that's also a nice way of dealing with community feedback too when you are live. If it is a live ops game, you start getting a lot of ideas that way, too. It's great to have something you can use to kind of show you're listening, but that you have, you have a certain way of addressing or determining what works.

Now I want to turn to story and writing a little bit, or turn back to it because we touched on it briefly. You've written a lot of games that have really touched people both with your comedy and with the emotion and the characters. I find that game writing is something that I wish was better generally. Do you agree with that? Do you have that feeling that it sometimes doesn't live up to maybe the opportunities that games provide for storytelling?

Sure. But it is hard. Storytelling is sort of by its nature a pretty, pretty linear medium, and games by their nature are a pretty nonlinear medium, and they sort of don't mix together well. There's, there's a bit of an oil and water thing, so it is very hard to do narrative within games. And so many of the easy ways to do it—just having some gameplay and then the gameplay suddenly stops and you have an episode, or kind of a little bit of narrative from a linear sequence, and then it ends and the gameplay resumes—that's just not really an integration of gameplay and story. It's more of, "now we have gameplay, now we have story." It's one or the other. It's not really an integration. So there's that.

I also think about Sturgeon's Law, Ted Sturgeon, the science fiction author who famously said, "90 percent of all science fiction is crap. But then again, 90 percent of everything is crap." And of course, it depends on your definition of crap. I always thought Sturgeon was being relatively forgiving. I think the real number is more like 99.9 percent, depending on how high a bar you're setting, how high your standards are. Then you're mostly going to be disappointed because very few things are kind of the epitome of whatever format you're looking at, whether it's games, music, writing, movies. So, I think there's certainly room for improvement. There's certainly room to celebrate some of the notable successes that we've had.

What are some of those for you? Like, what games that you feel like have done a great job?

Well, one that I always point to is Her Story. Very small, fairly quick-to-play indie game, but I would say from a narrative point of view, that probably gripped me more than any game that I've ever played. And certainly it was a case where the game mechanic and the narrative were definitely intertwined, not separate, as in the examples that I was giving earlier.

It's interesting. They take a linear medium and they chop it up so much and then make it interactive.

It was very, very innovative. I'm so glad that it did well because so often something as experimental as that gets seen by a few people who laud it, but then it sort of never, never goes wide.

I think that an advantage that games like Her Story and, and also the Infocom games had is that there wasn't necessarily all these other constraints and all these other things that were taking as much of a priority, right? Like, both those sort of realms of games really were able to prioritize story. Whereas if you're playing some current blockbuster AAA action adventure, the story is living along with all these other constraints and considerations.

True. Although I'd have to say just from a purely market-driven point of view, the story was really only, I'd say, of secondary consideration for us at Infocom. It was really the puzzles that were primary because, at the time, we were selling games through the retail channel at a price point of $40 or $50, which— we're talking early '80s dollars—so it’s probably like selling something for well over a hundred dollars nowadays. And so it had to deliver a pretty significant amount of playtime to sort of justify price points like that.

And when it came to the puzzle design, was that also a pretty intuitive process for you? Would you be taking out pad and paper and kind of working things out? What was that process like?

In terms of the intersection of the storytelling and the puzzle design, sometimes as you're creating a game, you're kind of focused on one element and sometimes on the other element. I once heard an interview with Paul Simon, the songwriter, and he was talking about when you're writing, do you write the lyrics first, or do you write the tune first? And he said, sometimes one way and sometimes the other way, but when it's best is when they both kind of come into my brain simultaneously.

And as an example, he said Bridge Over Troubled Water, that one bridge over troubled water. And he said that and the lyric popped into my mind simultaneously. And I feel like the same thing with kind of narrative design and puzzle design in those text adventure games—when you weren't doing one or the other, but it kind of came together in one simultaneous fusion.

I also wanted to mention the rather interesting example of one of my favorite puzzles that actually came to me in a dream, which was in my game, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. And it was this device called a tea remover. And basically, it was a little machine with a compartment, and you could put stuff that was small enough to fit in that compartment and then turn it on. And it would basically take the object and remove the “T.” So, one of the things that you could put in was a rabbit. And that would turn it into a rabbi. But the puzzle that you needed to solve was there was this character, King Miter, and everything he touched turned into a 90-degree angle.

And so he had accidentally touched his daughter, but he'd only brushed her and turned her into an 82-degree angle or something. But anyway, he was despondent and wanted her back. And somewhere in the game, you find a bottle of untangling cream. And if you put that in the tea remover, it turns into untangling cream, which you can then put on King Miter's daughter, and she's restored. So anyway, that obviously bizarre puzzle or even multi-part puzzle literally came to me in a dream that, fortunately, I retained when I woke up.

It's combining the language itself—the words of the story—kind of fit into the puzzle. It's very, very elegant and yet hilarious. So let's dive in a little bit to IP development. You've had a lot of experience both working with existing IP and bringing them to games and also doing original IP. How do you approach the process of IP development?

Certainly going back to the Infocom games, I worked with IP that had already been established. So my second game was Sorcerer, which effectively was the fifth game in the Zork series. And then the last game that I did at Infocom was Zork Zero, which was essentially the prequel to the original Zork trilogy, so I don't really consider in either of those cases that I was helping to originate IP. Although, I feel like I took an existing IP and moved it forward. I mean, you could say that my game Planetfall created an IP. We did a sequel, Stationfall. There was a novelization of it. Activision on several occasions initiated projects to do a third Planetfall game, but nothing ever came out.

Leather Goddesses, right?

Again, in what way was that an IP? I mean, obviously it was an IP for that one title, but—oh, there was a sequel, but it was horrible. It was basically, I did a design and handed that off to Activision, and they implemented it as they were going through bankruptcy. Activision actually went into Chapter 11, circa 1991 or so, moved from the Bay Area down to LA. The current Activision really has almost no relationship to the pre-bankruptcy Activision.

Well, we can take this any way you want, but it's an interesting distinction because to me, if you make an original game, even if there's not a bunch of additional properties that come out of it, it's still an original IP point that, if it becomes this bigger thing, then the IP is really turned into having a life of its own.

Right. So, I mean, if you just want to take Leather Goddesses as an example—well, what came first with Leather Goddesses was the title. The title really just started as a joke. Infocom was having a party. And at the time, the company was still pretty small, probably less than 20 people. And we were in one fairly small office that had a central room that was our conference room. And it was also our micro room, that is, the room where we had sort of one of each PC of that time period. And one entire wall was just a chalkboard. And on that chalkboard, we had what was called the matrix. Down one side was a list of every game that we had released, and along the top was basically every PC that we were supporting.

And then what kind of filled in this matrix was what was the current version out in the marketplace? So you could say, "Oh, okay, Zork I currently version 82. Zork I is what's being released on the Apple II or on the Atari 800." And that was important because effectively, we were always updating the games with new features, such as undo or fixing bugs. And so you'd want to know, "Oh, is this bug present right now in the IBM PC version of Deadline?"

So anyway, Infocom was having sort of its first party—not a really big party, but just inviting some important members of the press and people in the Boston area who had chains of computer game stores and things like that. And right before the party started, I added a line to the matrix that just said Leather Goddesses of Phobos with some fake numbers under each of the machines.

What inspired you to put that up there?

Oh, just basically pranking, mostly Joel, who was our president and who was, like, just really anxious that this party—even as unambitious or small of an event as it was—would go off flawlessly. And he saw it literally like moments before the first people were to arrive, and he couldn't have erased it faster. Nevertheless, sort of the name stuck in Infocom lore, and people were always referring to it almost jokingly as, "Oh, so what are you going to write next? Oh, maybe Leather Goddesses of Phobos." And then at some point, it came time for me to decide what I was going to write next, and I said, "Why not Leather Goddesses of Phobos? Everyone loves the name, we've been talking about it for years." And so I started working on the game with nothing more than that title.

So everything that I did was kind of focused on making sure that the game was as funny and silly as possible. And of course, the game also promised some ribaldness. And so a big part of the initial design was kind of figuring out where the right balance was between delivering on that and not making it objectionable to the point where stores wouldn't want to carry it. And anyway, that describes the first few months I spent working on Leather Goddesses. And I guess that was the IP development for that particular title.

So Steve, once you've created an IP and you've had some success with it, how do you go about leveraging it further? Where do you take it from there?

One example—actually two examples—from Playdom, neither of them that successful. We had a very early hit game on both MySpace and Facebook that was called Mobsters.

And where was this? You cut out for a sec.

I'm sorry. So this was at Playdom. This was circa 2008, 2009, and we had a very early hit game on both MySpace and Facebook that was called Mobsters, a very simple RPG. The game wasn't very well designed. It was already live when I arrived at Playdom, and the economy hadn't been well designed, so essentially soft currency had become completely meaningless. Every player after their first few days had infinite soft currency, basically, as far as the game was concerned.

And so one of my marching orders was to create a sequel to Mobsters that would leverage the IP but have a better-designed economy so that it would monetize better. So I did that. And we created a game that was more heavily narrative, a little more visually robust. It was still pretty primitive, I'd say, compared to most modern standards, but essentially the original Mobsters was almost entirely text with just some simple icons representing each item that you bought. This game was at least slightly illustrated. Each mission or scene would have at least a still 2D image. Anyway, it was not as big a success as Mobsters, even though I think per player it monetized way better, but it just never got the traffic. I mean, by the time it came out, there was so much more competition for players on Facebook than there had been when Mobsters launched a couple of years earlier.

Right. And Facebook had the kind of viral mechanics or opportunities they curtailed, and they were tamping down on that. What would you say, from those experiences, what would you say is the takeaway for someone who maybe has something and is thinking about sequeling it or trying to make a second, improved version?

Actually, here's another good example from Playdom, which was the most successful game that Playdom ever did, or maybe the second most successful game after our Marvel game. It was called Gardens of Time. It was a hidden object game. That was the core gameplay, but then from that core gameplay, you're earning decorations that you're using to decorate a garden. And because it was a time-travel-themed game, you're traveling all over time and doing hidden object screens in ancient Greece or Victorian England or what have you, and then you're earning decorations from that time period, which you can then place in your garden. So your garden could have an Egyptian section or an ancient Roman section.

I played that game. That was fun.

It was, and it was very successful. And so Playdom started doing some other hidden object games, but instead of trying to leverage the IP of Gardens of Time, the next game that came out was just a mystery game set in—I think—Victorian England or some sort of period like that. And the two main characters ran a detective agency. So the name of the game was Blackwood and Bell Mysteries or something like that. And so here we have one of the most successful games on Facebook. We're doing a new game in the same genre but doing absolutely nothing to leverage the fact that we have this hit game, right?

And I was pushing, "We're doing this mystery game, right? Let's call it Gardens of Crime and play off the success of Gardens of Time and just essentially create a line of games that would all be tied together."

You removed the "T," Steve. That would be Gardens of I'm.

So anyway, I was ignored, and Playdom was fairly balkanized. It was sort of a loosely tied together set of studios that often were somewhat competitive with each other instead of cooperative. And anyway, the game was released as Blackwood and Bell and did not do anything close to the numbers that Gardens of Time did.

Now you've also done a lot of games with existing IP and, and famously with Hitchhiker's Guide. What's been your approach there to taking and adapting existing IP?

Definitely a big piece of using existing IP is essentially managing the IP owner, managing the IP representatives. So Hitchhiker's was a very special case because I was working directly with Douglas Adams, who was the IP originator and the IP owner. But a more typical case is, whoever originated the IP, you're not dealing with them. It's owned by a large company. You're dealing with representatives, you're dealing with people for whom it's just a job. It's not their baby, so to speak, but it's kind of all over the place. Sometimes there are super strict rules about what you can do, what you can't do.

In fact, an interesting example was when I was working on that park-building game at Playdom Disney. We were working with lots of different IP owners all across Disney, and the rules were just so different. I mean, obviously there was Mickey Mouse, and he was sacrosanct. The rules for using Mickey Mouse could fill a three-inch binder, but then there were other characters for whom the rules were way looser. If you wanted to use, I don't know, Peter Pan or something like that, the hoops that you had to jump through were fairly minimal.

Pixar was incredibly sticky to work with. They had not only really high standards for what you did with their characters or with their IP, but they were also super busy and just really hard to kind of get cycles from, to get permission from, to get sign-off from. So yeah, you kind of had to learn almost IP by IP within the Disney family, what all the different rules were, who the right people to talk to were, what you could do, what you couldn't do. And just because you couldn't do it with this character didn't mean that you couldn't do it or shouldn't try asking about this other character.

If you were doing a new IP today or getting a new game for ambitious folks trying to start something up brand new, what do you think would be the way to go about that now?

Well, I guess first principles are: know the audience. Who are you making this game for, right? And, and so you want to certainly avoid an IP mismatch. If you're making a casual game, you might be a big fan of zombie apocalypses, but that's not going to be a good choice for your IP here. Or if you're making a game for a mid-core audience, farming or cooking is not the way to go. And also probably finding a nice middle ground.

You don't want something that's been done to death. I think farming is a good example. My gut sense is that people are pretty sick of farming as a theme, but you also don't want something that's too kind of offbeat or niche-y or kind of hard to telegraph in a quick ad or a single image, or the three seconds that a player is going to give you when they stumble upon your page on the app store.

So, kind of finding that middle ground between something that isn't done to death, but something that at least got some familiarity and is going to resonate with players. And then obviously, I mean, there are so many things that go into IP creation. There's naming, there's coming up with characters, coming up with an interesting set of characters, and how are they going to interact with each other, what are their personalities, and kind of make them interesting, give them quirks, don't make them just sort of bland cookie-cutter characters and what's the backstory of the world.

For the character development piece, do you have a particular way you like to do that? Do you write up the characters separately from the story? How do you...

Usually, I'll take however many significant characters there are, and obviously that depends a lot on what type of game it is, etc., but let's say there were five significant characters. I'll just write up maybe a three-page or so story about them—where were they born, what are their interests, where did they go to school, what do they love, what do they hate, what are their quirks, what are their hobbies? So a little bit like writing up those player personas, which I find fairly useful, particularly at this stage of a game when you're trying to figure out, okay, who are we writing this for? And also kind of getting the entire team all on the same page of thinking uniformly about who they're writing the game for. But in this case, you're writing them up. In both cases, they're fictitious characters, but in one case, they're people who you're writing the game for, and in the other case, it's people who are going to be appearing in your game.

And I find that those are really interesting to just really make sure that the character's interesting, that it's sort of a diverse lineup, the interactions between the characters are going to be interesting. And especially if this is a live service game, you're going to have to be writing kind of dialogue and action and events for these characters for potentially years to come. You want to make sure that they're interesting enough and kind of deep enough to support that.

Yeah, that's great. And when it comes to the kind of the story of the world or the kind of the backstory, you were mentioning that as well. How do you approach that?

It's kind of hard to give a one-size-fits-all approach to that. It depends so much on what kind of world it is, what kind of game it is—casual, mid-core, live ops or not. Is it going to be a small indie-ish effort? Is it going to be a big effort? Three-month development time? Two-year development time? There's so much you kind of need to know and take into consideration before you can say, "Okay, how do we design this world?" Everyone is pretty unique.

Yeah. Yeah. It depends a lot on the project. And I guess the need for story or backstory is going to vary a lot as well. Thanks, Steve. Anything else you want the PlayMakers audience to know?

Well, whole wheat bread is always healthier than white.

Right. Probably. They're an intelligent group.

Yeah, probably.

Thanks for coming on the show. This has been fun as always. Always have a smile on my face when I'm talking to you.

Well, I always have a smile on my face when I'm talking to you too, Jordan.

Well, I sure hope you enjoyed that interview with the great Steve Meretzky. If you're interested in working with Steve on what you're working on, you can find him on LinkedIn. I'll go ahead and put a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. You can find it right there or just look him up on LinkedIn and you can reach out directly.

Now, those of you who have made it here before, to the end of the episode, may know about the end of the episode Inner Circle Secret Club. Now, some of you may be new here, and that's great. We welcome new members to the secret end of the episode Inner Circle Club. I've got something good for you this week, so I, I'm sure I made some promises last week about like, "Hey, if you make it to the end next week, I'll have something for you." I don't remember what those are. And, and let's be real, whatever I said last week, that was last week, but I'm going to, whatever it was, I've got something better. That's the thing. I'm going to deliver something better. And here's what that is: me and Steve talking about the air quality in San Francisco during the airpocalypse that was happening and is happening. That's what I got for you on this week's secret inner circle club content BTS action. Let me set the stage here.

So as you heard at the top of the episode, me and Steve were about to start the interview and then my doorbell rang because I had to pick something up, some, you know, Amazon delivery or something like that. And I have to go up and down the stairs in my apartment in San Francisco. I have to take the stairs. I can't buzz people in. So I ran down the three flights of stairs and I ran up the three flights of stairs and I was totally winded. And, and that's when Steve started talking to me about the air quality, I guess, 'cause he heard how gassed I was. And he's telling me about the app that he uses to check the air quality. And that's where we pick up with this clip. Let's get to it.

And, Purple Air, it's the website where they just have monitors all over California and you can just see what the current air quality is close to you. Oh, and yeah, the one closest to me, the one closest to me right now is 298.

I'm at, oh my God, I'm at 234.

Yeah. That's pretty bad. Anything over 200 is pretty bad.

Okay, hold on. Let's just forget about the apocalypse for a little while.

Yeah, but, if I keel over during the interview, you'll know why.

Okay. Steve, welcome to PlayMakers. It's great to have you on the show.

And it is a delight to be here.

Okay. That is the clip, and I just think it's so hilarious that that is actually how we started the real interview. Thank you, Steve, for being such a great sport and, and for giving me some good laughs during what is a pretty challenging week here in California and San Francisco. And to all the millions and billions of people listening out there, thank you, PlayMakers. I appreciate you and I can't wait to see you on the next episode.