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.
Gameplay and plot
The Space Bar is a graphic adventure game that takes place from a first-person camera perspective. The player points and clicks with a mouse cursor to navigate the game world, examine and manipulate the environment, look around and converse with non-player characters. 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". At the bottom of the game screen, the PDA interface contains an item inventory, a mini-map, a journal and other features.
The Space Bar is a work of comic science fiction and detective fiction, set on the planet Armpit VI and inside a fantastical alien bar called The Thirsty Tentacle. The story begins with the murder of a private investigator near The Thirsty Tentacle, in an act of industrial espionage. Human detective Alias Node and his partner Maksh witness the murder, committed by a shapeshifting assassin, and Maksh is kidnapped by the perpetrator, who hides inside the bar. Assuming the role of Alias, the player interrogates roughly 40 aliens within The Thirsty Tentacle to locate the killer. Gameplay is nonlinear: the player may progress through The Space Bar and search for clues in any order. However, there is a time limit, and the player receives a game over for failing to arrest the assassin before they escape. It is also possible for the player character to be killed.
The core gameplay of The Space Bar occurs through Alias Node's Empathy Telepathy power. Activated when the protagonist establishes an emotional connection with another character, it inserts the player into the target's mind to live out its memories. Eight of these vignettes are included, with estimated lengths of 5–10 hours per segment. The Space Bars structure and puzzles change to suit each alien. For example, the blind Auditon creature must navigate by sound; objects in the game world are invisible until they make noise. Seedrot of the Vedj race is an immobile plant, and must solve puzzles from a single location, while "714-Z-367" of the Zzazzl race views the world through compound eyes. In the end, the player identifies the killer via an Empathy Telepathy excursion into the shapeshifter's memories.
Development Origins Boffo Games began pre-production of The Space Bar in May 1995, 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, and the publisher's promise to create 3D models for the game's alien characters. According to Boffo, Rocket Science sought The Space Bar as part of an effort to recover from its early years, following a string of major commercial flops. "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.
The Space Bar was directed by Steve Meretzky, a designer previously responsible for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall and other Infocom games. His core vision for the title was "an adventure game composed of a lot of smaller adventure games", which he compared to a short story collection. This was both an experiment and an effort to invent an adventure suited to the decreasing free time he perceived among people of the era. 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". He later noted that Cobb provided "countless ideas" on the design front. Meretzky had imagined the basis for the game in the 1980s, during Activision's purchase of Infocom. At the time, Infocom's New Zork Times newsletter was retitled The Status Line for legal reasons; however, Meretzky wanted to rename it The Space Bar and set it inside a fantastical spaceborne bar. This idea later developed into a game concept, and Meretzky began planning The Space Bar in the early 1990s. In 1996, Meretzky called the result's similarities to the contemporaneous Legend Entertainment game Callahan's Crosstime Saloon a coincidence.
One of Meretzky's concerns with The Space Bar was to create a graphic adventure game with as much breadth and interactivity as Infocom's interactive fiction, which had not featured graphics. He sought to match the "background detail" of these titles, including their abundance of non-essential content to explore. 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". Believing that an adventure game composed only of minigames would be incohesive, he devised The Space Bars murder mystery storyline and Empathy Telepathy mechanic to bridge the gaps between the game's shorter segments. Meretzky considered the result his furthest-ever push into nonlinear gameplay, and later compared the solution to his design for Boffo's previous game Hodj 'n' Podj. After roughly four months of developing the design, Boffo began production of The Space Bars visuals and code in the middle of September 1995.
Production The Space Bar was created with the BAGEL ("Boffo Adventure Game Engine and Libraries") engine, which was designed to advance technological and interface ideas that Steve Meretzky had enjoyed in Activision's Return to Zork. 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. As Meretzky believed that "traditional 2D sprite-based animation wasn't suitable for much of what they wanted to accomplish," according to PC Gamer USs Todd Vaughn, the team opted to pre-render the game's graphics. In 1996, Meretzky summarized BAGEL as an amalgam of the most successful elements of every adventure game released during "the last few years", which he had studied for ideas. Boffo co-developed the engine with Rocket Science Games. Continuing a trend that had started with Hodj 'n' Podj, Meretzky wrote no code for The Space Bar, although he did offer design input on the engine. BAGEL was programmed in C++ and was created to be platform-independent; The Space Bar was developed for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. A very high-level programming language was implemented for the creation of in-game content, such as conversations, locations and puzzles.
Ron Cobb worked as The Space Bars concept artist and art director, the first time the latter position had existed in a Meretzky production. Previously, Meretzky had relied on his own "awful sketches" to direct the art team. One such sketch was the starting point for The Space Bars Vedj race, which was then developed through several iterations by Cobb. The Mos Eisley Cantina sequence was among the game's points of influence, and the team sought to match that scene in quality, according to Meretzky. He noted that the game's diverse cast meant that they "weren't just creating new characters every week, but entirely new races." Boffo relied on out-of-house subcontractors for The Space Bars graphics, including Dub Media, which had produced the 3D visuals for the developer's canceled Reverse Alien game.
Calling Cobb "something of a perfectionist", Meretzky described a moment when the final graphics for the Marmali race were first delivered; their number of toes was inconsistent, as Cobb's concept art had left this element vague. Cobb composed a rough model sheet to clarify the issue, and the graphics were revised. Meretzky later considered his collaboration with Cobb "one of the real thrills of my career". Mike Dornbrook, discussing the decision to choose Rocket Science for The Space Bar, said in 1998 that he believed "Steve was right about what Ron could contribute to the game".