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

game designer Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in ...

( implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid.

Life and career

He was born in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

, grew up in

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

, and attended

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, where he obtained a degree in

political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

science 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 ...

'' game (also called ''Colossal Cave''), he was fascinated by the concept and—together with

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''. Career Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will ...

, Tim Anderson and

Bruce Daniels Bruce Daniels is an American hydroclimatologist, business executive and computer programmer. He is known in Silicon Valley as one of the pioneers of the personal computer and user-friendly interfaces. Daniels earned his Ph.D. from the Universi ...

—set out to write an adventure game with a better

parser Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lat ...

, which became ''

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

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

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

Starcross Starcross is a village with a 2011 census recorded population of 1,737 situated on the west shore of the Exe Estuary in Teignbridge in the English county of Devon. The village is popular in summer with leisure craft, and is home to one of t ...

'', '' Suspect'', ''

Spellbreaker ''Spellbreaker'' is an interactive fiction computer game written by Dave Lebling and published by Infocom in 1985, the third and final game in the "Enchanter Trilogy." It was released for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Atar ...

'', ''

The Lurking Horror ''The Lurking Horror'' is an interactive fiction game released by Infocom in 1987. The game was written by Dave Lebling and inspired by the horror fiction writings of H. P. Lovecraft (including his Cthulhu Mythos). The original release was for MS- ...

'' and ''

James Clavell's Shogun James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguat ...

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

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

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, in the United States. At the 2020 census, the town population was 18,491. The United States Census Bureau considers Concord part of Greater Boston. The town center is near where the confl ...

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

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