Michael Berlyn

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Michael Steven Berlyn (born October 21, 1949 in Brookline , Massachusetts ) is an American computer game designer and science fiction writer.

Life

Berlyn graduated from Florida Atlantic University . He started writing at the age of 15, but did not publish his first novel, Crystal Phoenix , until 1980. Two more novels soon followed, The Integrated Man (1980) and Blight (1981, under the pseudonym Mark Sonders).

During this time he also bought his first computer, an Apple II , got to know the text adventure Colossal Cave and soon other games and from there his fascination for computer games dates, which in the 1980s led him to less and more with writing books Games, game development and game design. He founded his own computer games company, Sentient Software , in 1981 , where Oo-Topos (1982) and Cyborg (1982) appeared, but wasn't too successful with it, which is why he was hired by Infocom in 1982 and made his debut there in 1983 with Suspended . It was followed by Infidel (1983) and Cutthroats (1984). Most recently he worked at Infocom on Fooblitzky (1985), a not very successful attempt to combine board and computer games.

He then founded a small software company, Brainwave Creations, with his wife, Muffy McClung Berlyn, and together they developed the games Tass Times in Tonetown (1986) and Dr Dumont's Wild PARTI (1988). Berlyn also took on orders from software houses. After the decline of the game software industry on the east coast, the Berlyns moved to California , where Berlyn worked for Accolade and Altered Destiny (1990) and the Bubsy games were created.

In 1990 another novel by Berlyn, The Eternal Enemy (1990), was published, a dystopian story of a terminally ill person who is converted into a breeding and fighting machine by an alien race of ingenious genetic engineers.

In 1994, together with Marc Blank, he founded Blank, Berlyn and Co. , which was later renamed Eidetic , and initially developed crossword puzzles and other games for the Apple Newton and later concentrated on PC and Playstation games. In 1997 a text adventure was created again: on behalf of Activision , Michael and Marc Zork developed: The Undiscovered Underground as an advertisement for Activision's Zork: Grand Inquisitor . This renewed contact with the genre of text adventure let Berlyn realize that writing interactive, text-based games was what actually interested him. He left Eidetic and started Cascade Mountain Publishing . The company released a number of titles including Once and Future (1998) and a revised version by Dr. Dumont (1999), but ultimately the economic success did not materialize and in 2000 the company's website was closed. In 1999, Berlyn had developed the game Siphon Filter for the Playstation on behalf of Sony .

After the disappointment with Cascade Mountain Publishing , Berlyn retired from game development for a few years and returned to Florida. However, the proliferation of smartphones and game apps prompted the Berlyns to make a new attempt in the field of interactive fiction . Your company Flexible Tales develops and distributes appropriate Ebook -Computerspiel- hybrids for iOS , Windows and OS X .

Works

Games

  • Oo-topos , 1981, Sentient Software and Polarware / Penguin Software
  • Cyborg , 1981, Sentient Software
  • Gold Rush , 1982, Sentient Software
  • Congo , 1982, Sentient Software
  • Suspended , 1983, Infocom
  • Infidel , 1983, Infocom
  • Cutthroats , 1984, Infocom (with Jerry Wolper)
  • Fooblitzky , 1985, Infocom (code designer)
  • Tass Times in Tonetown , 1986, Activision
  • Dr. Dumont's Wild PARTI , 1988, First Row Software Publishing
  • Keef the Thief , 1989, Electronic Arts
  • Altered Destiny , 1990, Accolade
  • Les Manley in: Search for the King , 1990, Accolade
  • Snoopy's Game Club , 1992, Accolade (together with former Intellivision developer Gene Smith)
  • Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind , 1993, Accolade
  • Bubsy 3D , 1996, Accolade
  • Zork: The Undiscovered Underground , 1997, Activision (with Marc Blank)
  • Dr. Dumont's Wild PARTI , 1999, Cascade Mountain Publishing
  • Siphon Filter , 1999, 989 Studios, Sony (Production)
  • Zen Ball , Quick Click Software
  • The Art of Murder , iOS, Windows, OS X, Flexible Tales (with Muffy Berlyn)
  • Grok the Monkey , iOS, Windows, Flexible Tales (also called Carnival of Death , with Muffy Berlyn)
  • A Taste for Murder , iOS, Windows, Flexible Tales (with Muffy Berlyn)
  • Reconstructing Remy , iOS, Windows, Flexible Tales (interactive novel, with Muffy Berlyn)
  • Ogg! , iOS, OS X, Flexible Tales

Novels

literature

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Berlyn, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berlyn, Michael Steven (full name); Sonders, Mark (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer game designer and science fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Brookline , Massachusetts