~4 minute readINSIDE GAMING
Here's a Real Game Doctor, Mark Blank!
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There seem to be just about as many ways to become a creator of games as there are people inventing the videogames, computer simulations, coin-ops and stand-alone devices we all love so dearly. Many of the biggest names started out in other fields of endeavor, only to end up making a handsome living out of what started as a hobbyist's interest in electronic gaming.
Mark Blank, the 28-year-old force behind the three-disk Zork series and Deadline (all published by Infocom), may well have reached his chosen profession by the most circuitous route possible. Certainly, he's the only man in the world who holds both a degree from Albert Einstein Medical College and an Arcade Award (for Deadline as Best Computer Adventure Game).
Mark first encountered computers while going to high school in his home town of Teaneck, NJ in the early 1970's. "It was an IBM 1130," Blank recalls fondly, "the kind that input data on punch cards." He put together a few little games for his own amusement, but did not become a dyed-in-the-wool computerist, for the simple reason that he didn't own his own machine.
Mark's next significant brush with the computer field came during his freshman year at M.I.T. in 1972. He took a computer course, again involving the IBM 1130, and found his interest slowly growing greater and greater. "Things were really different then," he points out. "My teacher showed me a three-foot-square cube near the machine one day, and I was really impressed that it could hold 8K of memory. These days, our games contain many times that amount of information."
Although he also took a course in artificial intelligence as a junior, what really set Blank on the road he has traveled so far, was landing a research project involving computers at M.I.T.. One project led to the next and, even after Mark went on to Albert Einstein in 1977, he continued to do consulting work for M.I.T..
The event that had the greatest impact on his career, Blank believes, was the introduction of the original Adventure by Crowther and Wood for the PH 10 system. "We used to spend all our time playing the game," B1ank says. "Dave Lebling, Tim Anderson and I felt really satisfied when we finished Adventure, but we didn't know where to go next for more of the same."
Thinking that they could build an even better game on the foundation laid down by Adventure, the trio began work on what would eventually see the commercial light of day as Zork I. "The original version had 10 or 12 individual problem situations," says Blank, "and input was in the traditional verb-noun format since we used a two-word parser."
Over the ensuing 18 months, the game was greatly enlarged and decked out with all sorts of sophisticated enhancements. "What drove us was the desire to present more and more challenging problems for the players," says Blank. One of the key additions was the introduction of so-called "interrupt routines" which cause certain events to occur in response to other events taking place.
The parser has also come in for repeated overhaul. "We've redone it six times, " the designer explains, "to add things like adjectives and noun clauses." These changes led the way to today's state-of-the-art Infocom system.
Although Mark does get a chance to play many of the popular home arcade action games -- and likes the coin-ops at his local game parlor -- his personal preference is for games which place heavy emphasis on unraveling very enigmatic situations. "When I'm working on a computer game," he says, "I create the problems first and then go on to development." Having some top-notch adventure game designers at Infocom helps a great deal in this regard, because no problem situation gets put onto a disk until several people have helped to fine-tune it. "I don't enjoy the cut-and-slash adventures as much as the ones that stress problem-solving, because the fight-fight-fight can get repetitious as the player battles against essentially the same monsters."
That's why most of the games on which he has labored give the player little or no incentive to fight. You've got to think your way through a Mark Blank creation.
One of the hallmarks of the Infocom line is that all the adventures utilize text only without illustrations. This is a question Mark has pondered quite a bit personally and, as he told Electronic Games, it has been the subject of "some arguments around here." Although he hasn't dismissed the idea of increasing the visual component of his games -- Infocom will be doing some non-adventure programs with graphics in 1983.
"Pictures or not, adventures are inherently verbally-oriented," Mark asserts. "The challenges to the player are verbal in nature, and in that light, I'm not sure how much the illustrations actually help. You can describe things better in words than you can show them in the simple drawings used in most computer games."
Working as a team with new Infocom addition, Michael (Cyborg) Berlyn, Mark is helping to put the finishing touches on a really novel adventure program currently going under the title, Suspended. It's going to be a boardgame/computer game hybrid which casts the player as a disembodied brain hooked up to a mammoth computer.
"The problems players must solve will not be all that difficult in themselves," warns Blank, "but getting things done efficiently will be the real challenge."
And where does Mark see the adventure gaming field heading a little further along? "I think that, over the next year or so, we are going to see games with much more sophisticated interaction and complex situations. There'll also be more attempts to introduce characterization, even in the viewpoint character, so that the heroes and heroines in the game will develop as they have adventures and experiences."
When those more sophisticated and challenging adventures do reach the retail stores, it's a safe bet that the designer of at least a few of them will be ol' Mark Blank.
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