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. Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.