Peter David Lebling (born October 30, 1949) is an American

interactive fiction Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...

game designer ( implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including

Infocom Infocom, Inc., was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerston ...

and Avid.

Life and career

He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It borders the states of Virginia to its south, West Virginia to its west, Pennsylvania to its north, and Delaware to its east ...

, and attended MIT, where he obtained a degree in

political science Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and Power (social and political), power, and the analysis of political activities, political philosophy, political thought, polit ...

before becoming a member of its Laboratory for Computer Science. After encountering the original ''

Adventure An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme spo ...

'' game (also called ''Colossal Cave''), he was fascinated by the concept and—together with Marc Blank, Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels—set out to write an adventure game with a better

parser Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term '' ...

, which became ''

Zork ''Zork'' is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson (programmer), Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company ...

''. In 1979, he became one of the founders of Infocom. His games include ''

I,'' ''II'' and ''III'', '' Starcross'', ''

Suspect In law enforcement jargon, a suspect is a known person accused or suspected of committing a crime. Police and reporters in the United States often use the word suspect as a jargon when referring to the perpetrator of the offense (perp in dated U. ...

'', '' Spellbreaker'', '' The Lurking Horror'', ''

Maze A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lead ...

'' and ''

James Clavell's Shōgun ''James Clavell's Shōgun'' is a graphic and Adventure game, text adventure game written by Dave Lebling game and published by Infocom in 1989. It was released for the Amiga, Apple II, MS-DOS, and Mac (computer), Mac. The game is based on the 19 ...

''. After Infocom's end in 1989, Lebling worked on a GUI

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

program, joined Avid (a company doing special effects for broadcast and film), and designed server applications at Ucentric. Lebling currently resides in

Concord, Massachusetts Concord () is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. In the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the town population was 18,491. The United States Census Bureau considers Concord part of Greater Boston. The town center is n ...

with his wife. He is a programmer for British defense contractor

BAE Systems BAE Systems plc is a British Multinational corporation, multinational Aerospace industry, aerospace, military technology, military and information security company, based in London. It is the largest manufacturer in Britain as of 2017. It is ...

References

External links

*
Interview with Dave Lebling
at Adventure Classic Gaming (2001) 1949 births Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Pioneer Award recipients American video game designers American video game programmers Infocom Interactive fiction writers Living people MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni People from Maryland People from Washington, D.C. {{videogame-bio-stub