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Marc Blank
Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, ''Zork''. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. Career Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will Crowther's ''Adventure'' game while he was studying at MIT in the mid-1970s, where the game was played on mainframe computers. Blank was frustrated by the computer's tiny vocabulary; when it parsed user inputs very few words were recognized. After thinking about the problem during his undergraduate years, he started work on his own adventure game using MDL, a computer language invented at MIT. Blank and a handful of friends wrote the original version of ''Zork'' on a PDP-10 while he was attending medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City (he received his MD degree in 1979). Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but elec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deadline (1982 Video Game)
''Deadline'' is an interactive fiction detective video game published by Infocom in 1982. Written by Marc Blank, it was Infocom's third game. It was released for the Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, Commodore 64, IBM PC (as a self-booting disk), Osborne 1, TRS-80, and later for the Amiga and Atari ST. ''Deadline'' was Infocom's first mystery game, their first non-''Zork'' game, and the game that started their tradition of feelies. The number of NPCs, the independence of their behavior from the player's actions, and the parser's complexity were considered revolutionary at the time of the game's release. Also innovative was its use of "feelies"; physical documents that came with the game to help the player solve the mystery, resulting in its more expensive cost relative to other text adventures of the time. Plot The player's character in ''Deadline'' is an unnamed police detective, summoned to a sprawling Connecticut estate to investigate the apparent suicide of wea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Next Generation (magazine)
''Next Generation'' was a US video game magazine that was published by Imagine Media (now Future US). It was affiliated to and shared content with the UK's '' Edge'' magazine. ''Next Generation'' ran from January 1995 until January 2002. It was published by Jonathan Simpson-Bint and edited by Neil West. Other editors included Chris Charla, Tom Russo, and Blake Fischer. ''Next Generation'' initially covered the 32-bit consoles including 3DO, Atari Jaguar, and the then-still unreleased Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Unlike competitors '' GamePro'' and '' Electronic Gaming Monthly'', the magazine was directed towards a different readership by focusing on the industry itself rather than individual games. Publication history The magazine was first published by GP Publications up until May 1995 when the publisher rebranded as Imagine Media. In September 1999, ''Next Generation'' was redesigned, and its cover name shortened ''NextGen''. A year later, in September 2000, the ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grand Inquisitor
Grand Inquisitor (, literally ''Inquisitor General'' or ''General Inquisitor'') was the highest-ranked official of the Inquisition. The title usually refers to the inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, in charge of appeals and cases of aristocratic importance, even after the reunification of the inquisitions. Secretaries-general of the Roman Inquisition were often styled as ''Grand Inquisitor'' but the role and functions were different. The Portuguese Inquisition was headed by a Grand Inquisitor, or General Inquisitor, named by the Pope but selected by the king, always from within the royal family. The most famous Inquisitor General was the Spanish Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, who spearheaded the Spanish Inquisition. List of Spanish Grand Inquisitors Separation of Inquisitions of Castile and Aragon Castile Aragon Reunification of the Inquisitions List of inquisitors-general of Portugal * D. Diogo da Silva (1536–1539), Archbishop of Braga. * Cardinal D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Undiscovered Underground
''Zork: The Undiscovered Underground'' is an interactive fiction video game written by former Infocom Implementors Marc Blank and Michael Berlyn and implemented by G. Kevin Wilson using the Inform language. The game was commissioned by Activision Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one o ... as a free promotional product to coincide with the release of '' Zork: Grand Inquisitor''. It was released on August 28, 1997. Plot ''Zork: The Undiscovered Underground'', a prelude to ''Zork: Grand Inquisitor'', is set in the year 1066 GUE. The game is played from the viewpoint of a private in the Inquisition Guard, tasked with exploring a recently discovered area of the Great Underground Empire. The game merges classic "Zorkian" references such as grues and zorkmids with elements cr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eddie Dombrower
Eddie Dombrower (born 1957) is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He co-created the baseball games '' Earl Weaver Baseball'' and ''Intellivision World Series Baseball''. He also designed the first dance notation computer software, ''DOM''. Dombrower studied dance and mathematics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduating, he considered the possibility that the new microcomputer technology might provide a method by which choreography could be annotated and recorded for display in animated graphic form. He created the "DOM (for the first three letters of his surname) system" on an Apple II computer in 1981/1982. It allowed Choreography, choreographers to use a system of codes to record their work. The resulting dance movements were then displayed by a figure on screen. In 1982, Intellivision game design director Don Daglow (also a Pomona College graduate) recruited Dombrower to join Mattel to work on a new type of baseball game that, for the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016. The company was founded as Activision, Inc. on October 1, 1979, in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari, Inc., Atari game developers upset at their treatment by Atari in order to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. The video game crash of 1983, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the experience of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apple Newton
The Newton is a specified standard and series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Computer, Inc. from 1993 to 1998. An early device in the PDA categorythe term itself originating with the Newtonit was the first to feature handwriting recognition. Newton devices run on a proprietary operating system, Newton OS; unlike the company's Mac (computer), Macintosh computers, Apple licensed the software to third-parties, who released Newton devices alongside Apple's own MessagePad line. Apple started developing the platform in 1987; concepted by Steve Sakoman as a Tablet computer, tablet-like device with handwriting capabilities, he worked with AT&T Corporation to develop a low-power processor, AT&T Hobbit, Hobbit, for the project. However, slow progress and other issues led to Sakoman leaving Apple in 1990 to form Be Inc., Be Computer, Inc. The Newton project would be revitalized by Michael Tchao and Steve Capps who pitched the idea directly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Productivity Software
Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings, electronic music and digital video). Its names arose from it increasing productivity, especially of individual office workers, from typists to knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider than that. Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing, and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the United States, some 78% of "middle-skill" occupations (those that call for more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree) now require ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bend Studio
Bend Studio (formerly Blank, Berlyn & Co., Inc. and Eidetic, Inc.) is an American video game developer based in Bend, Oregon. Founded in 1992, the studio is best known for developing ''Bubsy 3D'', the ''Syphon Filter'' series, and ''Days Gone''. Since 2000, Bend Studio is a first-party developer for Sony Interactive Entertainment under PlayStation Studios. History Marc Blank and Michael Berlyn founded Bend Studio as Blank, Berlyn & Co. in 1992. Blank had been a founder and the product development director for Infocom, while Berlyn, an author of adventure games, had previously worked at Infocom before moving to Accolade, Inc., Accolade. Blank was approached by a California company after an employee had used Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone, a software package by Infocom, and remembered that the company also developed games. That company was looking to release a "sound-oriented game machine for cars", for which Blank suggested a series of sports games that would sound like ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Berlyn
Michael Berlyn (1949 – March 2023) was an American video game designer and writer. He was best known as an implementer at Infocom, part of the text adventure game design team. He is also known as the designer behind '' Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind'' (1993) and '' Bubsy 3D'' (1996). Life and career Brainwave Creations was a small game programming company started by Michael Berlyn. The company was founded in the mid-1980s, and is probably best known for co-creating '' Tass Times in Tonetown'' along with Interplay's Rebecca Heineman. Berlyn joined Marc Blank in founding the game company Eidetic, which later became Bend Studio. In the midst of working on the company's second game, '' Syphon Filter'', Berlyn left the video game industry. He later explained, "I did not like what the game business had become, the people who were driving it, or the nature of the product. I left before it was done and said, 'Do not put my name on the product.' I walked away from my ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Quest Begins
''The Quest Begins'' is the first novel in the ''Seekers'' series. It was written by Erin Hunter, which is a collective pseudonym used by authors Cherith Baldry, Kate Cary, and Tui Sutherland and editor Victoria Holmes. The novel details the adventures of four bears, Toklo, Kallik, Lusa and Ujurak, who are stranded together in the wild and must learn to survive. The declining environment around the bears is a theme explored throughout the novel. The development of the ''Seekers'' series began as a result of a request from HarperCollins for another series about animals to the authors who wrote the ''Warriors'' series about feral cats under the name of Erin Hunter. The novel was published on 27 May 2008. The book sold well and had generally positive critical reception with reviewers suggesting the series would appeal to fans of ''Warriors''. Development and publication Conception ''The Quest Begins'' and the ''Seekers'' series began as a request from HarperCollins, who wanted V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
