The Space Bar

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.

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 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.