Brian Moriarty

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Brian Moriarty in 1984 alongside Infocom's main DECSYSTEM-20 computer

Brian J. Moriarty (* 1956 ) is an American game designer . He is known for his work for the game developers Infocom and Lucasfilm Games in the 1980s.

Life

In 1978 Moriarty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Massachusetts . In the same year he began working as a salesperson at a RadioShack branch in Worcester , where he taught himself to program a TRS-80 during working hours . He later worked as a technical writer for Bose Corporation . In 1981 he bought an Atari 800 as his first own computer. Strange Odyssey by US author Scott Adams sparked his passion for text adventures . In 1982, through an acquaintance, he got an editorial position at the computer magazine ANALOG Computing in Worcester, which mainly dealt with home computers of the Atari brand . Moriarty worked there as a technology editor. In 1984 he moved to the well-known game manufacturer Infocom in Cambridge , 70 kilometers away , where he worked initially as an application programmer and later as a game designer.

In April 1988 Infocom was doing so financially that Moriarty had to pay for the flight himself to attend the West Coast Computer Faire . At a lecture by Chris Crawford , he sat next to Noah Falstein , who had produced the successful Koronis Rift and PHM Pegasus games for Lucasfilm Games . Lucasfilm had been very successful financially last year with the graphic adventure Maniac Mansion and was desperately looking for new authors for other such games. Falstein was a fan of Moriarty's work for Infocom and was aware of the company's financial difficulties. He started talking to Moriarty, who moved to Lucasfilm four months later.

In 1993 Moriarty left the Californian game company in a dispute and in the same year he was hired as a game designer at Rocket Science Games . In 1995 he and two friends founded the company Mpath Interactive, based in Cupertino . Mpath was one of the technically leading providers in the still young market of online games . Moriarty acted as "Head of Game Design" in the company. Mpath ran into financial difficulties in 2000 and was sold to competitor GameSpy in 2001 . Moriarty's next position was that of the creative director of the mobile games division of the technology group Comverse Technology , and later he moved to the same position at the media company Foundation 9 Entertainment .

Moriarty has been a computer science professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute since 2009 , where he teaches game design. He is a member of the International Game Developers Association and one of the few game authors to be a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America .

plant

During his time at ANALOG Computing , Brian Moriarty published two text adventures, which were included as listings to type in in two issues of the magazine: Adventure in the 5th Dimension (1983) and Crash Dive! (1984). Crash Drive is based on the idea of ​​an action game advertised with posters in 1982 by ANALOG Games (the software division of ANALOG Computing) , the programming of which, however, was never started; Moriarty created a text adventure based on the theme of the concept. Immediately after the launch of Crash Drive! Moriarty left the company. At this time he had for ANALOG at one of the Atari slot machines Quantum reminding action game with the working title Tachyon work that was not completed after his departure. The backbone of his two text adventures was reused for at least three other ANALOG games written by Clayton Walnum , Tom Hudson and Chris Smith.

At Infocom, Moriarty was initially responsible for the maintenance and further development of the in-house development environment ( Z-machine ) and converted it for the home computers Commodore Plus / 4 and Tandy Color . In 1985 he switched to game design and presented the Infocom management with a first concept draft for Trinity , which was rejected as too ambitious. His first game realized for Infocom, Wishbringer , sold around 100,000 units. With that success behind him, he went to Trinity , which was released in 1986. It sold almost 50,000 units and was the world's first game to be released for the newly released Commodore 128 home computer . Moriarty's next project, Beyond Zork, required a further development of Infocom's own game engine : Since pure text adventures now seemed visually anachronistic and ignored the possibilities of modern 16-bit computers, he had the processing of changed character sets implemented in order to allow graphic elements in the game surface and incorporate some technical details such as mouse support and a function for taking back moves. Moriarty also integrated role-play elements in an Infocom game for the first time . Beyond Zork was released in October 1987 and sold 45,000 units, which, while not a much-needed hit, made it Infocom's most successful game of the year.

At Lucasfilm Games, Moriarty was not given any content specifications, and he developed the script for Loom . The graphic adventure published in 1990 was praised as innovative because it radically simplified the complex, text adventures-simulating interface of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken , which later became the standard for other companies' graphic adventures. Critics panned the game as too easy, too short and too gloomy, and the sales figures (a good 500,000 units) fell short of expectations, so that a planned sequel was not tackled. For Moriarty, Loom should be the last adventure he was responsible for. After Loom , he worked on three other adventure games, but they did not get beyond the concept stage. When Noah Falstein gave up his project The Dig , which had been in development since 1989 , Moriarty took over the helm and revised the concept on a large scale. After missing several milestones , the project was taken away from Moriarty in 1993, whereupon he left the company in frustration.

At Rocket Science Games, he transformed a concept by comic artist Ron Cobb into the interactive film Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine in 1994 . One of the programmers who worked on the game was Elon Musk .

As a professor of game design, he published a development environment called Perlenspiel , which teaches the basics of game design in a universe reduced to the bare essentials.

reception

The US computer game magazine Next Generation described Moriarty in an interview published in 1996 on the future of the online game market as "one of the most famous and respected game designers" who was responsible for "some of the best text adventures ever created". Ludo historian Jimmy Maher judged in a Beyond Zork retrospective that Moriarty was retrospectively “the most gifted prose stylist among the (Infocom authors who) weave elegant sentences that make (Beyond Zork) one of the best generic fantasy stories ". Gamasutra counts Moriarty's Trinity to the "7 works of interactive fiction that every developer should study" ( seven interactive fiction works that every game developer should study ).

Moriarty's lectures at industry conferences , especially the Game Developers Conference , are widely received. During the 1999 talk, Who Buried Paul? (named after the conspiracy theory " Paul is dead "), he put forward the widely respected thesis that the artificial intelligence of NPCs or computer opponents works much more advanced than it was actually programmed when the NPCs or computer opponents occasionally random, Perform actions that are not based on the actions of the player, since the player interprets these actions as tactically advanced actions. His GDC lecture from 2002, The Secret of Psalm 46 , was incorporated as a full-length video recording (58 minutes) as an Easter Egg into the adventure The Witness, published in 2016, and converted into a graphic novel by Spanish comic artist Iván Sende in 2016 . In the 2011 lecture, An Apology for Roger Ebert , Moriarty advocated the provocative thesis that the film critic Roger Ebert was right with his off-screen thesis that computer games were not art, which was controversially discussed in numerous media. His 2015 lecture also attracted attention, in which he carried out a retrospective analysis ( postmortem ) of his classic Loom .

Ludography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c James Hague: Halcyon Days . 1997, Brian Moriarty ( dadgum.com ).
  2. ↑ a b Filfre.net: Loom (or, how Brian Moriarty Proved That Less is Sometimes More). Retrieved January 23, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b What's the future of online gaming? . In: Next Generation . July 1996, p. 6.
  4. ^ Ed Hall: The Garret: Write Your Own Text Adventure . In: Atari Classics . 2, No. 4, August 1993, p. 7.
  5. ↑ a b Filfre.net: Beyond Zork. Retrieved January 23, 2020 .
  6. ↑ WPI.edu: Trailblazing Video Game author Brian Moriarty to Present at Prestigious 2015 Game Developers Conference. Retrieved January 23, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Rob Smith: Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts . Chronicle Books, San Francisco 2008, ISBN 978-0-8118-6184-7 , pp. 56 .
  8. ↑ Heise.de: GDC: Tomorrow's game designers practice on the pearl game. Retrieved January 24, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Gamasutra.com: 7 works of interactive fiction that every developer should study. Retrieved January 23, 2020 .
  10. ^ Richard Rouse III: Game Design: Theory & Practice . 2nd Edition. Wordware Publishing, Sudbury 2005, ISBN 1-55622-912-7 , pp. 168 .
  11. ↑ Kotaku.co.uk: The Hunt for The Witness's Final Secret. Retrieved January 24, 2020 .
  12. ↑ DiaboloEdiciones.com: El Secreto del Salmo 46. Mensajes escondidos en el arte. Retrieved January 24, 2020 .
  13. ^ Fran Blumberg: Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-989664-6 , pp. 159 .
  14. ↑ Gamasutra.com: Brian Moriarty explains Loom in GDC 2015 Classic Game Postmortem. Retrieved January 25, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Moriarty, Brian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moriarty, Brian J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American game developer
DATE OF BIRTH 1956