The Space Bar

1998 video game

The Space Bar is a 1997 graphic adventure game developed by Boffo Games and published by Rocket Science Games and SegaSoft. A comic science fiction story, it follows detective Alias Node as he searches for a shapeshifting killer inside The Thirsty Tentacle, a fantastical bar on the planet Armpit VI. The player assumes the role of Alias and uses his Empathy Telepathy power to live out the memories of eight of the bar's patrons, including an immobile plant, an insect with compound eyes and a blind alien who navigates by sound. Gameplay is nonlinear and under a time limit: the player may solve puzzles and gather clues in any order, but must win before the killer escapes the bar. The Space Bar was conceived and directed by Steve Meretzky, a former Infocom employee who had previously created titles such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Meretzky hoped to design a graphic adventure in the spirit of text based interactive fiction games, and to recapture that genre's breadth and level of interactivity. The Space Bar began development at Boffo Games in May 1995 under publisher Rocket Science Games, whose co founder Ron Cobb—designer of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars—served as the game's art director and concept artist. Its 18 month production was troubled, and Rocket Science went bankrupt before the game's release. The Space Bar was ultimately launched by publisher SegaSoft in July 1997, several months after its completion. The game was a commercial flop, and Meretzky has described its sales performance as possibly the biggest disappointment of his career. Critics highlighted The Space Bars extensive content and number of puzzles, and regularly noted its difficulty. Some praised it as a welcome return to its genre's roots, although Computer Gaming World found the game poorly designed and needlessly abstruse. The Space Bar became the second and final title released by Boffo Games, which folded in fall 1997. Steve Meretzky later joined WorldWinner to become a developer of casual games.

The Space Bar is a graphic adventure game that takes place from a first person camera perspective. In a manner that has been compared to Myst and Zork Nemesis, player movement is restricted to jumps between panoramic static screens; the camera view can rotate 360° on each screen. A pop up menu is used to interact with characters and the environment: the menu's options change depending on the object selected, and can include actions such as "greet" or "take". after signing with publisher Rocket Science Games earlier that year. The game had initially been pursued by other publishers, including Microsoft and Viacom New Media; the latter had offered to implement it with the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine license. Boffo selected Rocket Science in large part to collaborate with that company's co founder Ron Cobb, a concept artist whose previous design work had appeared in the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. Other bonuses included Rocket Science's marketing power, which had attracted high profile press coverage to its past titles, "They'd failed miserably with the first batch of games, and they were looking for folks who would fix that," Boffo's Mike Dornbrook said in 1998. He noted that it was "painful on the business side" to reject Microsoft's proposal, and that the publisher was "not happy" with the decision. The companies made an informal agreement to work together in the near future. To design The Space Bar, Meretzky collaborated with his long time associates Patricia Pizer and Tomas Bok, and included Ron Cobb in "a few of the early design brainstorming sessions". Meretzky also tried to mimic the high difficulty of these older games, which he felt would lead to greater satisfaction for players. He noted during development, "I think it comes closest to recapturing the depth we've only seen until now in text adventures". However, like QuickTime VR and the Z Vision engine of Zork Nemesis, Boffo Games chose to enable 360° panoramic scrolling of each environment the player visits. Continuing a trend that had started with Hodj 'n' Podj, Meretzky wrote no code for The Space Bar, Boffo relied on out of house subcontractors for The Space Bars graphics, including Dub Media, According to Dornbrook, the budgeting scheme to develop the engine was split across "at least" two games, a gamble that Boffo felt was viable because of its number of simultaneous projects. The Time Warner contract collapsed in the fall of 1995, alongside the publisher itself, and the Time contract was lost after roughly four months of production. Microsoft, planned as what Dornbrook called a "fallback", became unavailable after the start of its partnership with DreamWorks Interactive in March 1995. This had given DreamWorks exclusive rights to develop games in the interactive movie and adventure game genres; Microsoft agreed not to compete in these fields. That same month, Rocket Science partnered with CyberCash in a venture to develop microtransaction based arcade games for the Internet. According to Dornbrook, outside infusions of capital allowed Rocket Science to remain in business. The publisher signed Boffo for several more titles, and a deal was reached to increase The Space Bars budget, which fully funded creation of its engine. The Space Bar was the largest production of Meretzky's career at the time, with a team size and budget bigger than any of his previous games. Its development lasted roughly 18 months Peter Smith of Computer Games Strategy Plus wrote that the two titles "made a big splash" at the show. However, Meretzky later told Gamasutra, "With typical Boffo luck, they [Rocket Science] ran out of money halfway through the project and sold our game to SegaSoft." and signed with SegaSoft to publish The Space Bar, Rocket Jockey and Obsidian. By the 20th, Rocket Science's old marketing division had been picked up by the publisher and put to work on these titles' promotional effort. All three games were set to launch by Christmas. SegaSoft described the deal as an effort to break into the computer game industry; its first releases in this market—Puzzle Castle and Fractured Fairy Tales—launched later that year. Estimated in PC Gamer USs September 1996 issue as three fourths complete and on track for October, In reaction, SegaSoft split with Rocket Science in early April 1997 and the developer entered a financial downward spiral, closing later that month. Mike Dornbrook said development concluded in early 1997, but issues at SegaSoft regarding marketing delayed its release for half a year.

The Space Bar was a commercial flop. Steve Meretzky later summarized that it "sold like bat guano", and described its commercial performance as possibly the biggest disappointment of his career. Noting that "the mentality of gamers had definitely changed" since the 1980s, Meretzky also expressed regret over his decision to make The Space Bar extremely difficult. He characterized this move as the most major design mistake of his career by 2000. PC Gamer US writer Allen Rausch hailed The Space Bar as a return to form for its genre, which combined the high points of interactive fiction with the strengths of modern graphic adventures. Its puzzle design, humor and level of interactivity received plaudits, although Rausch found fault with its disk swapping and some of its voice acting. CNET Gamecenters Barry Brenesal enjoyed the game's visuals, humor, puzzles and Empathy Telepathy sequences, but noted that The Space Bar "is not the end all of adventure games." He agreed with Rausch's and Scorpia's assessments of the puzzles: the game features "arguably a greater density of sheer fiendishness than anything else on the market". which Meretzky called in 2005 "one of the saddest days in my twenty plus years in the industry." Boffo Intergalactic Games and Jordan Freeman Group would also release the game via Steam on March 30, 2023. The game would remain, like all of ZOOM Platform's previous Steam releases, DRM Free.