Douglas Adams
Dave Anderson
Bob Bates
Michael Berlyn
Marc Blank
Amy Briggs
Liz Cyr-Jones
Patricia Fogleman
Stu Galley
Jim Lawrence
David Lebling
Steve Meretzky
Brian Moriarty
Jeff O'Neill
Jerry Wolper
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Bob Bates was one of the later writers to become and Implementor after he began a company to compete with Infocom. He says he approached Infocom to license some of their technology and ended up joining them in 1986. "I was the only outside game designer that they ever used (with the exception of Douglas Adams)." The Infocom mythos was firmly in place by the time he arrived. "I was running in fast company and I was privileged to play in their yard." The Infocom style stuck with Bates and is a driving philosophy behind his own company Legend Entertainment. For instance, Bates says, "It was clear that there were some good things [about game design] and there were some bad things. A 'restore puzzle' was a bad thing, something where a player had to die in order to learn the information that he would have needed in order to solve the puzzle. That was universally regarded as a sin against game design and that's something I have carried on and taught the designers here at Legend." For him, the Infocom style was a much bigger influence on his design work than any one of the writers. Much of that Infocom style can be seen in Legend's more recent releases of Mission Critical and the hot-selling Shannara. (Courtesy www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom.) Bob Bates has worked on games as early as 1987 and as recently as 1998. Has been credited with Design, Interpreter / Development System, Producer, Writing / Dialogue / Story, Playtesting, Programming, Additional Programming, Documentation, Lead Design, Project Leader, Quality Assurance, Special Thanks To and Unknown. Has worked with the following game development companies: Legend Entertainment Company, Red Orb Entertainment, Challenge Inc. and Infocom. (Courtesy www.mobygames.com.)
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