<!--
	Title: Marc Blank: The Programmer Behind Zork
	Author: Kathy Yakal, Editorial Assistant
	Source: Compute's Gazette, v1(4)
	Date: October 1983
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<blockquote style="border-bottom: 4px solid var(--dark); font-size: 1.1em;">
<p><strong>Don't call Infocom a "software publisher." Or its creative staff “game
programmers." This month's "Inside View” looks at the rather unusual evolution
of a staff of game designers and the unique products they are creating.</strong></p>
</blockquote>

Take a look at any software best-seller list. Chances are you will see a great
number of games that involve gobbling up little dots, or shooting at something
that's trying to annihilate you, or working your way through mazes.

<img class="float-left-narrow" src="/public/img/articles/marc-blank-the-programmer-behind-zork/marc-blank-low-quality.jpg" alt="Marc Blank">

There is another kind of computer game that has developed quite a following
over the last few years: the adventure game. "We're the only people committed
to that sort of game," says Marc Blank, 28, vice-president of Infocom and the
programmer behind *Zork*. "I'm happy to be doing something that no one else is
doing."

To date, Infocom has seven products on the market: *Zork I*, *II*, and *III*,
*Starcross*, *Deadline*, *Suspended* and *Witness*. All adventure games. And
all successful. "Our adventures are more like books than games.” says Blank.
“They are a valid form of entertainment, a new kind of fiction.”

## Early Inspiration

Blank’s personal interest in adventure games goes back to when he was an
undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1970s.
He, along with people all over the country, played the original *Adventure*
(written by Don Woods and Willie Crowther, who were then at Stanford) on huge
mainframe computers. *Adventure* required a tremendous amount of memory -— about
one megabyte.

This original adventure game was based loosely on the Dungeons and Dragons
theme –- а fantasy that requires its players to take on the personas of other
characters as they engage in an imaginary trek through a castle, seeking
treasure and warding off monsters.

The major interaction in this large-scale fantasy game was two-word commands
typed in by the players on their own terminals at home and transmitted through
a modem over the phone lines. The computer played the role of the dungeon
master; it knew where all the treasure was hidden and all the danger lurked,
and would execute the players’ commands and tell them the results of their
actions.

One of the problems with this initial version, according to Blank, was the
computer's lack of vocabulary. Because it would accept only two-word commands,
the computer made some decisions that would have made the game more
challenging had they been left up to the player. For example, you could enter
the command, “Open door," and if there was more than one door near you, the
computer would decide which one you meant.

## The Birth of *Zork*

Marc Blank believes that one of the motivations for programming is to see if
you can do something better than what's already been done. So he started to
work on an adventure game of his own.

Using MDL, a computer language invented at MIT, Blank and some of his
acquaintances wrote the original version of *Zork* on a PDP-10 (a mainframe).
Blank had by this time finished his undergraduate studies and was attending
medical school at Albert Einstein in New York.

The mainframe version of *Zork* first became available in June 1977.

Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but decided not to pursue that
profession, opting for what he considered a more creative field. He and a few
other people spent the next year developing a language that they could use to
program adventure games like *Zork* on the new microcomputers.

Memory limitations of micros forced them to cut the original version of Zork
in half. But, says Blank, the new game was actually more complex. It took up
about 70K (which does not mean that you need a computer with that much memory
to play *Zork*; the program is set up so it calls on different sections at
different times).

Blank believes an important element of adventure games is making the players
feel like there's no computer there —- that they're actually participating in
the fantasy. One of the ways this was accomplished was by developing an
English language parser that would allow the computer to respond to more than
two-word commands.

<figure class="float-right">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/marc-blank-the-programmer-behind-zork/zork-screen-shot.png" alt="Zork Screen Shot">
	<figcaption><em>Pausing for refreshments in a game of</em> Zork
		<em>on the Commodore 64. Note the program's amusing response
		to the compound sentence "Get the bottle and drink the
		water."</em></figcaption>
</figure>

"Ап adventure game is only as good as its parser, that part of the program
through which the player communicates with the game's environment," says
Blank. "If the parser gets in the way of the player's creative expression,
even the best-plotted game can become slow, tedious, and frustrating."

The original *Zork*, programmed for the Apple and the Radio Shack TRS-80, had
a 600-word vocabulary, which helped accomplish Blank's goal of communicating
with the game itself. Later Infocom adventures have even larger vocabularies.

## Providing An Alternative

In a market as volatile as the microcomputer software industry, it’s highly
unusual for one publisher to dominate the best-seller lists. Infocom has
managed to do that. In its four years of existence, the company that Marc
Blank helped create has yet to produce an unsuccessful product. Why?

"They're good. Very entertaining," says Blank. "After all, the classics stay
in print, don't they? Besides, peoples' imaginations don't go out of style."

Blank doesn't see adventure games as a replacement for arcade games -— merely
an alternative. "I like arcade games as well as anyone, but a computer can
handle much more than games," says Blank. "People like to see themselves as
characters in a story. We're committed to giving them those stories."
