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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Marc Blank, born in 1955, was one of the authors of the original mainframe Zork in 1977, but before committing himself fully to the later founded Infocom, he followed his parents wish to become a doctor and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Even during that period his heart lay with programming and gaming. His spare time work with Joel Berez on the "Z-Machine" was fundamental for Infocom's success, and he eventually became one of the company's co-founders on June 22, 1979. Not much later in the same year he replaced the resigning Mark Broos on the board of directors. His immediate task at Infocom had been to oversee the conversion of "Zork" to home computers, but when that was settled he became interested in doing something new and on his own. In 1982, now in the position of vice-president of product development, he was ready for it: his profound love for murder mysteries led him to write "Deadline," which, as a mere side effect, prompted a very favorable entry in the New York Times Book Review of May 8, 1983. But his position kept him from authoring more titles, so 1983's co-authoring of "Enchanter" remains his only other title up to 1986, when, unhappy with the course the company was taking and due to personal commitments, he officially resigned and left. Still, he was not lost to his fans, as his love for telling a great story and his ties to Infocom remained strong. He kept active at developing the Z-Machine further and made use of the advancements in "Border Zone" and "Journey." When Infocom ended it became quiet around Marc on the commercial software market, but he kept in contact with fans and even helped one of them on the development of a past-Infocom era text adventure, Curses, in 1993. In 1994 he teamed up with Mike Berlyn to found Blank, Berlyn and Co, which was later renamed to Eidetic, their very own gaming company. At first they published crossword puzzles and other word games for the Apple Newton, and later specialized on PC and Playstation titles. Marc returned once more to text adventures, when in 1997 Activision asked him and Mike to do the small "Zork: The Undiscovered Underground" as promotion for the release of their graphical game "Zork: Grand Inquisitor." Eidetic's first release for the Playstation, "Syphon Filter," became one of the biggest hits for the console in 1999 and the latter series that emerged out of it, is one of Sony's most important title assets in console gaming. In 2001 Eidetic became part of Sony and is now known as "Sony Bend." (Courtesy www.infocom-if.org.)
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