Tim Anderson is an American

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

best known for co-creating the adventure game ''

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 ...

'', one of the first works of

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 ...

and an early descendant of '' ADVENT'' (also known as ''Colossal Cave Adventure'').

Career

While attending MIT, Anderson got his start in game development by developing the game ''Trivia'' (1976) alongside future collaborator Marc Blank for the 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 ...

, the school's mainframe, playable over

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

. ''Trivia'' proved itself popular with the limited userbase of ARPANET, leading Anderson and Blank, as well as Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling to collaborate on a new game. All four were members of the Dynamic Modeling Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, with all but Blank working by day writing software for

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

, which afforded them access to MIT's mainframe, even after they had graduated. The team had spent a considerable amount of time working on solving the game '' Colossal Cave Adventure'', mostly referred to at that time as simply ''Adventure''. The team enjoyed ''Adventure'', but found themselves frustrated with the limited interface of the game, specifically its two-word command structure. Bolstered by their earlier experience writing games for the PDP-10, the team set out to create what would eventually become ''Zork''. Originally developed from 1977 to 1979 in the MDL programming language for the PDP-10, ''Zork'' would prove immensely popular on ARPANET. After the success of ''Zork'' on its limited platform, Anderson and the other members of the team founded

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 ...

, initially with no actual business plans, but settling on

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desig ...

''Zork'' to home computers. The home computer ports of ''Zork'' would prove immensely successful, and Infocom grew rapidly, focusing on producing new text adventures, as well as branching out into business software. Anderson would take on the title of "senior scientist, special-projects programmer" within the company, mostly assisting with development of new games. The company's expansion into business software ultimately caused them to de-emphasize game production, which lead to their eventual demise in 1989. After Infocom shut down, Anderson held a variety of positions in the defense and business sectors, including serving as the CTO of OffRoad Capital, a

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

startup for investing in private equity online. The San Francisco-based firm maintained the first Internet site that allowed high-net-worth individuals to invest electronically in established, growing companies.

Personal life

Anderson obtained his bachelor's degree from MIT in 1975, and his masters in 1977, both in Computer science. Since 1996 Anderson has lived in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and has been active in local politics, seeking election on more than one occasion.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, Tim Infocom Living people People from Sudbury, Massachusetts American video game programmers 1954 births