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Brian Moriarty built his first computer in the fifth grade. Oblivious to the path that spelled out for him, he graduated from Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1978 with a degree in English Literature . Four years later, in 1982, working as an editor at Analog Computing magazine, he made his first experience with an Infocom adventure, "Deadline." Brian had already written a couple of games in BASIC, which had been published in Analog, and Deadline's impressive parser and depth of story immediately got him interested. For him it must have been the perfect mix between his geek affinity for computer technology and his sense of the finer arts. It took until 1984 that he finally was offered a job at Infocom and his first task was helping on "Seastalker." Not much later he started on a game of his own, "Wishbringer," which some people up to today rate as one of the most beautiful stories ever told in an Infocom game. But his most ambitious project was "Trinity," which, written in the final days of the Cold War, dealt with the story of the atom bomb and nuclear war. He traveled around the world to do research for it and even visited the "Trinity" site, where the world's first atom bomb was launched. Along with Steve Meretzky's "A Mind Forever Voyaging" the game made it clear that serious topics can benefit from being dealt with in an adventure game, as it gives an unusual and interactive angle on a subject. Brian stayed with Infocom almost up to the end and incidentally his last game there, "Beyond Zork," marked the final struggle of transforming from text-only adventures to those with graphics. It was not long after Infocom's end that his talent took him to the most powerful company in graphical adventure gaming in the late 80's and early 90s, Lucas Arts, although his first game there, "Loom," was regarded with only mixed success. The breakthrough came with "Sam & Max: Hit the Road" which now enjoys legendary status for its comical humor. In 1995 Brian left Lucas Arts while he was working on "The Dig," a space adventure, before the game got finished. His version was never released and he later was credited with "Additional Additional Story." He then became Senior Game Designer at Rocket Science, a now defunct company, where he wrote "Lodestar: The Legend of Tully Bodine." Not much later he decided to form his own company, MPath, where he planned to write multiplayer games for the internet. MPath later was merged with Hearme and Brian left.The original MPath site with Brian's bio can still be found on their server. Please note his haircut and tie. At the present Brian is Director of Game Development at Skotos Tech, a multiplayer gaming company specializing in interactive fiction. Yes, text only. (Courtesy www.infocom-if.org.) "This may sound slightly pretentious of me, but in a way it's like being one of the Beatles," says Brian Moriarty on being a member of the cult-adored Infocom. "It's kind of weird, especially in the last few months where I'm getting all kinds of e-mail from people who are really interested in the Infocom thing. I have to admint, it's not a bad thing for the resume (laughs)." He really didn't ever think of how influential Infocom would become, but the reason it has lies with the games. "...they were really good games. They were much better than the stuff that's coming out now (laughs)." Moriarty says that the text adventure games didn't have the "twitch" factor, a term used to explain the pulling of a trigger when a shadow slides across the corner of your eye as in the case in many arcade games. "When you compare them [text based games] to the graphic adventure games that are coming out now, there's really no comparison at all in terms of quality and story." "Professor" Brian Moriarty discovered Deadline while working as an editor at Analog Computing, which covered the Atari computer. "And the game had this intelligent parser which could actually parse more interesting sentences than simply verb/noun. You could have verb/noun and indirect object and other new stuff. And it was just so classy," says Moriarty, "and exciting...So I got the fever and I knew I wanted to do this." It was in 1984 that Infocom reached out and tapped Moriarty for an engineering job. His first assignment was working on Seastalker. Several months later, Moriarty wrote Wishbringer, "...which had the good fortune to come out right after Hitchhiker's (Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy)." Trinity, a fantasy game set around the development of the nuclear bomb, is Moriarty's favorite among the three he wrote, a list that includes Beyond Zork. More recently, Moriarty had Loom published by LucasArts and worked on The Dig as well. For Rocket Science he designed Lodestar. He is now busy designing multi-player games for the Internet with his own company, Mpath. (Courtesy www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom.)
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