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David Lebling
Steve Meretzky
Brian Moriarty
Jeff O'Neill
Jerry Wolper
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Dave Lebling has worked on games as early as 1982 and as recently as 1993. Has been credited with Design, Interpreter / Development System, Lead Design, Original Concept, Other, Programming and Unknown. Has worked with the following game development companies: Infocom. (Courtesy www.mobygames.com.) Dave Lebling was one of the original Imps co-authoring the mainframe Zork, then Zork II and Zork 3. "The thing that's neat about Infocom," he says, "is the same thing that's neat about...oh, Tolkien in the early days or being a science fiction fan back when it was schmuck being a science fiction fan. That kind of thing. It's a small kind of cult thing and you can feel a sort of pardonable pride in being a little more literate than the people who like thinking they're a little more literate who like the graphical adventures. So it's kind of kept on." Lebling says Infocom was fortunate because the company was formed while computers were coming into their own as well back in those late days of 1977. Working at Infocom was a "great experience" regardless of whether the company was making people "happy or infuriated or both," comments Lebling. He absolutely misses those days, even though he very much enjoys his current job - designing digital film software [ed. note: for Avid Technology] for commercial use. Besides co-authoring the Zork trilogy, he also co-authored Enchanter and then by his lonesome wrote Starcross, Suspect, Spellbreaker, The Lurking Horror, and Shogun, the last game released by Infocom. Does the first person admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America for writing interactive fiction (along with Steve Meretzky) ever want to write another text-based game? "Every now and then I do, I must admit," he comments. "I follow the Internet newsgroups that talk about interactive fiction...and there are things there that allow you to write Infocom-style games. It isn't the syntax we used at Infocom, and I occasionally think, 'You know, download one of those and write something.'" Lebling says all the duties of working and raising a family prevents him from actually creating a game. One thing driving those Infocom hobbyists on the Internet is they don't believe many of today's graphical games have enough story. "I've heard that complaint too," says Lebling. "I guess the only thing I can say [is that] it's sort of a compliment to us. The whole thrust of the text adventure was one picture was worth a thousand words and we would rather give you the thousand words." All the Infocom writers talk about how much fun they had. Lebling is no different. "It was great fun. It was the kind of fun that I think [you have] when you are simultaneously young and doing something that no one has never done before and succeeding at it, which is even better." Lebling does feel good about the Zorks, but he has a special place for Starcross. It was his first game written with a co-author. "Starcross was completely insane. It was an homage to Arthur C. Clark and Larry Niven who were two of my favorite science fiction writers, and you had one of the most amazing packages that anyone had ever done. It was packaged in a flying saucer that you could fly around the room. So that was pretty cool." (Courtesy www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom.) It was a merry day in 1950 when Dave Lebling said his first hello to the world in Washington, D.C. After his family moved he grew up in suburban Maryland and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Being at the Buckingham Palace of computing he still might have taken a different path, hadn't one of his college advisors there, right in his freshman year, asked him how he felt about taking a programming course. Dave said yes due to a hole in his schedule, but found he actually enjoyed it. As a matter of fact he apparently enjoyed it tremendously and it didn't take long until he wrote his own version of "Spacewar," the probably very first space-action game. Some time later he became a member of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), by then having a degree in political science already in his pocket. A lot of other programs, not only games, followed. His "Maze" (later succeeded by many derivates called "MazeWars"), written in collaboration with Greg Thompson, perhaps even made him one of the fathers of 3D multiplayer first person shooters. As Dave was in the middle of writing his own computerized "Dungeon Master" assistant for "Dungeons & Dragons," an earthquake hit him and all computer geeks on campus. And that earthquake had a name: "Adventure" (or "Colossal Cave"). At first, he and his friends at LCS were practically stunned by Adventure, something like that had never been seen before, but after a time they found flaws in it and wanted to do something like it better - just for fun. "Just for fun" became "Zork" and Zork eventually became "Infocom" (see History). In the beginning Dave didn't commit himself fully to the "project" Infocom, he kept close ties to MIT and later actually paid hommage to the university in "Lurking Horror" - "GUE Tech's" campus, the "infinite corridor" and many more places in the game are modeled after actual sites at the school. It was only later that he fully engaged himself at Infocom and in the end, literally, it was him who wrote the last game ever produced at the company's original place in Cambridge, Massachusetts - "Shogun." After Infocom's end Dave took on the more serious site of programming and worked on a GUI spreadsheet program and later joined Avid, a company working on special effects for movies and TV shows. Currently he is employed at ucentric as a systems engineer. (Courtesy www.infocom-if.org.)
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