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