Tim Anderson is a

computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

who helped create the

adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw ...

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 and ...

'', one of the first works of

interactive fiction '' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...

and an early descendant of ''

ADVENT Advent is a Christian season of preparation for the Nativity of Christ at Christmas. It is the beginning of the liturgical year in Western Christianity. The name was adopted from Latin "coming; arrival", translating Greek ''parousia''. In ...

'' (also known as ''Colossal Cave Adventure''). The first version of ''Zork'' was written in 1977–1979 in the

MDL programming language MDL (Model Development Language, or colloquially also referred to as More Datatypes than Lisp or MIT Design Language) is a programming language, a descendant of the language Lisp. Its initial purpose was to provide high level language support fo ...

on a DEC

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

computer by Anderson,

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 ...

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 ...

, and

Dave Lebling Peter David Lebling (born October 30, 1949) is an interactive fiction game designer ( implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid. Life and career He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Mar ...

. All four were members of the Dynamic Modeling Group at the

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 ...

Laboratory for Computer Science.

References

*https://web.archive.org/web/20090116035446/http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html Infocom Living people People from Sudbury, Massachusetts Video game programmers Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-compu-bio-stub