1977年：Dave Lebling、Marc Blank、Tim Anderson与Bruce Daniels开始了原版《魔域》的编写。不像Crowther、Daglow和Yob，《魔域》开发小组了解到将这些游戏移殖至新式个人电脑的潜力，进而在1979年成立了文字冒险游戏的出版商Infocom。该公司后来卖给了Activision。谈到经典的“关系”(译按：许多人怀疑游戏开发者间互相参考的关系)案例，Lebling跟Will Crowther都是同一《龙与地下城》社团成员，不过并非同一时间。根据Lebling自己的讲法：“我认为当Will Crowther退出时我实际上顶他的工作。我们玩过《Advent》，觉得《魔域》是从它衍生出来的...而且我们试着做得比它‘更好’。我们没有借用代码...而且我们一直到很后来才碰到Crowther或者Woods。”
Marc Blank is an American computer game designer and game programmer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first hit text adventure computer games, Zork.
In high school he collaborated with Alex Citron on a simulation of a major league baseball season called CWABL, standing alternatively for Computerized Winner Automatic Baseball League or Citroblamatic Whizamadingy Automatic Baseball League, which came to employ a pseudorandom number generator classmate Robert Goodman programmed on an electronic calculator for CWABL, which despite its name was otherwise run by manual table look-up.
Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will Crowther's Adventure game while he was studying at MIT in the mid-1970s, where the game was played on mainframe computers.
Blank was frustrated by the computer's tiny vocabulary; when it parsed user inputs very few words were recognized. After thinking about the problem during his undergraduate years, he started work on his own adventure game using MDL, a computer language invented at MIT. Blank and a handful of friends wrote the original version of Zork on a PDP-10 while he was attending medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
The free-play university version of Zork first became available on the MIT-DM PDP-10 in June 1977. It was then distributed by the Digital Equipment Corporation DECUS program and spread to many colleges in the United States and Canada.
Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but the call of Zork was irresistible. He and several friends spent the next year developing a specialized computer language that they could use to program text adventures like Zork on the new microcomputers.
The Apple II's limited RAM required them to cut half of the original version of Zork. The new Zork for the Apple and the Radio Shack TRS-80, had a 600-word vocabulary. They founded the new company Infocom to publish the game and more like it.
In 1993 he teamed up with former Infocom writer Michael Berlyn to found Blank, Berlyn and Co.. The company's name was later changed to Eidetic. They initially published productivity software for the Apple Newton. Eidetic's Notion: The Newton List Manager became a hit and was ultimately bundled in all Newtons.
Marc returned to text adventures in 1997 when Activision producer Eddie Dombrower asked Blank and Berlyn to create a small promotional game, Zork: The Undiscovered Underground as promotion for the release of Activision's graphical game Zork: Grand Inquisitor.
As Newton sales faded, Eidetic changed gears to focus on PC and PlayStation games, producing the hit Syphon Filter in 1999. In 2000 Sony acquired Eidetic for an undisclosed sum.
Blank left Sony in 2004, where he focused on his email client for the Palm Treo smartphone, ChatterEmail. On February 22nd 2007, Blank announced he would no longer be "actively" working on ChatterEmail.
早在1977年，Adventure就已经在ARPAnet风靡起来。无数人有了第一个教训：一个简单的电脑角色扮演游戏能够让人把工作、睡觉和人们之间的联系都搁置一边直至玩完 游戏。
MIT的 Marc Blank、Tim Anderson和Bruce Daniels在兴奋地玩完Adventure后便将他们的注意力转移到创建他们自己的游戏中来。他们画地图并细化细节，这就是后来的Zork（以Anderson的说法，Zork是在开发中的计算机程序的一个很普通的主题）。
根据从D&D和Adventure的设定中得到的灵感，Zork是一个具有迷宫、陷阱以及其他乡村幻想元素的游戏。游戏中只是呈现简短的关卡，玩家只需输入简短的命令就可以推动情节发展。跟先前的Adventure相同，Zork也没有提供可视效果。若需要地图，那么你可以在探索的同时在图纸上画出来。
这类简单解密游戏真正的美不是在外表上，开发者已经非常仔细和灵活地设计了物体、动作、位置之间的交互，这使得在特定的时间或地点增加新元素非常容易。在发布新版本时，创建者会向游戏中加入新的元素和值得探索的系统。
1979年，在最后一个支持者加入后，创建者同其他MIT同事一起成立了Infocom，这是最早的计算机游戏公司之一。为了赶上个人电脑的第一个浪潮（包括苹果I），1980年，Infocom同 Personal SoftWare合伙发行了Zork。
存储器大事记： 随着计算机的发展超越了共享型大型机平台，并走在家庭市场的前面，人们需要一种简单的方法来携带信息，以方便地从一个地方带到另一个地方。感谢5.25"软盘的发明，人们可以传输数据并减轻了负担，同时，它也鞭策着个人家庭电脑的发展。 5.25"软盘是基于个人电脑来设计的，用来替代正在使用的8"软盘。到1978年，至少10个制造厂商在生产5.25"软盘。1980年，硬件冲击着家庭电脑市场，虽然许多年后其中的很多部件还是被看成奢侈品。 1981年，Sony研制开发出来的3.5"软盘驱动器和磁盘再次冲击了市场。1982年采用了Hewlett-Packard技术，它随之成为工业标准，并出现了3.25"、3"、3.9"这些竞争产品（准确一些，这是因为从工业角度来说，市场需要微型软盘的标准）。 下一个浪潮，只读型紧凑磁盘，或CD-ROM技术，都于1985年出现在市场上，但是直到1990年，它们还是没有大范围使用。 |
Adventure在电脑硬件狂热者中是最著名的，并且后来才以生活消费为市场，这几乎是一个回忆般的感觉。另一方面，Zork 具有个人电脑使用时代降临的优势，通过广告宣传和其他商业支持产品的优势，它变成一个巨大的成功。
