OS. Reception The Space Bar was a commercial flop. The editors of Computer Gaming World noted that it was "one of the year's best adventures, but, unfortunately, it never seemed to find an audience (call it the curse of Rocket Science)." 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. However, both Mike Dornbrook and Meretzky were pleased with the game's critical reception. In 2011, Adventure Gamers named The Space Bar the 98th-best adventure game of all time. 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. Conversely, Scorpia of Computer Gaming World wrote that The Space Bar "just misses the mark" and is recommendable mostly to players "with a high tolerance for frustration." While Rausch and Scorpia agreed on the game's high difficulty and reliance on trial and error gameplay, she considered both the result of poor puzzle design. She also criticized the time limit and lack of traditional detective gameplay, and called The Space Bars comedy strained and inferior to that of Superhero League of Hoboken, despite "some genuinely humorous touches". 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". In Computer Games Strategy Plus, Cindy Yans similarly praised the game as "a puzzle parfait from heaven", with an unusually extensive amount of content. Despite sharing Brenesal's admiration for the visuals, she broke with him on the quality of its animation, particularly the lack of lip sync, and agreed with Rausch on the spotty voice-over. As with Brenesal, Rausch and Scorpia, she noted the game's high level of difficulty: