Interview with Dave Lebling

Delve into the annals of adventure game history and you'll soon run across the works of Dave Lebling. This prolific Implementor co-authored mainframe Zork, Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, and Enchanter, and also wrote Starcross, Suspect, Spellbreaker, and The Lurking Horror. In our interview, we asked for an update on his post-Infocom activities and his thoughts on the current state of the gaming industry.

Q. How and when did you get involved in programming, and what led you to coding adventure games?

I got involved in programming due to a fortuitous hole in my schedule in the first semester of my freshman year. My advisor said, "Why don't you take a programming course? It might come in handy." Well, I was more-or-less hooked from the start, and always had an interest in games and other fun stuff. I remember coding a version of the old Spacewar game, for example. I also was co-author of the first -- that I know of -- multiplayer MazeWars-style game; we just called it Maze. I helped Marc Blank and Tim Anderson [later fellow Zork implementors] write a Trivia game that maintained a user-contributed Trivia database of over a thousand questions. I had also written for my own use some Dungeons and Dragons "Dungeon Master Assistant" code that was still in a fragmentary state when Adventure hit MIT and changed everything.

Q. Could you please summarize your post-Infocom activities, and what projects you're currently working on? What kind of work do you do at Avid?

Well, I first worked on a cross-platform GUI spreadsheet. A very boring thing compared to Zork, but I learned a lot about C, Windows, X, Motif, and other nasty topics. It was also a great development group, so professionally it was a Good Thing, even if it wasn't gaming. At Avid, well... I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you afterward, if you catch my drift. Avid is a leader in software for producing and editing video, audio, and multimedia for the professional and broadcast marketplace. For example, "Home Improvement" is edited using Avid systems.

Q. Do you still frequently hear from Infocom game fans? What kinds of things do they still ask you about most often?

I wouldn't say "frequently," compared to how often I used to hear from them. In the old days I'd get strange phone calls a lot. When I started posting occasionally to rec.arts.int-fiction I began to get a reasonable amount of email, but it's nothing excessive.

Q. Do you still keep in contact with any of the other Implementors?

I see Tim Anderson, Steve Meretzky, and Stu Galley with some frequency -- we all still live in the Boston area. I haven't actually seen any of the others in quite a few years, although I get Christmas cards or email every now and again.

Q. How would you describe your involvement with the world of text adventure games these days? Do you still do any game development as a hobby?

My involvement these days consists of reading r.a.i-f and r.games.i-f, browsing the Web, reading the magazines (such as Computer Gaming World), etc. I haven't actually done any game development in quite a while -- I've got a fairly large number of game ideas, but not a great deal of time!

Q. Do you play the current games-under-discussion from GMD?

I keep up with the newsgroups, but I haven't played any of the games. I feel bad about that, because some of them sound really fun. Perhaps I'll make time, but then, that's what I always said at Infocom, too -- I eventually played all our games, but it often took a long time to get to them. I've now gone so far as to download a bunch of the new games. This is progress!

Q. Do you have a favorite Infocom game? Of the ones you worked on, which one did you have the most fun developing?

There are things I like about every Infocom game, even Shogun (which was, I think, both my worst and our worst). I've always been fond of Spellbreaker and Enchanter from my own list. I think I had the most fun writing The Lurking Horror, although I wish (we all wished) that it had been an "Ezip" (meaning larger-size) game. A lot of lovely shivers had to be cut out of the design, and some stuff out of the almost-finished product. It was a labor of love, set as it was at a thinly-disguised MIT, with lots of real places and a somewhat-accurate geography. Aside from the actual monsters, the course of the game duplicates "Institute Exploring" adventures I went on when I was a freshman.

Q. In retrospect, are there any design changes you would have liked to have been able to make to your games, for example, different solutions for overly difficult puzzles?

You know, one of the nice things about a game is that you usually do one version of it, and don't have to think too much about changing anything later. Still, the baseball puzzle in Zork 2 has always annoyed me. It arose from my hatred of mazes -- I was always looking for ways to write mazes that weren't mazes if you guessed the "trick," but that one was pretty lame.

Q. What are your thoughts about the current state of the computer gaming industry and the proliferation of blockbuster multimedia CD-ROM games?

I think the biggest change since the Infocom days is the rise of expensive-to-develop titles. The sheer size of the budgets and development teams for today's adventure games (I won't call them "interactive fiction") is astonishing. It has made the industry more like the movie industry -- a few big hits, a few mid-range successes, and a lot of dreck. Today, a lot of the titles that are fondest-remembered from the Infocom days, such as Trinity, would never be made -- too esoteric, non-commercial, unlikely to make money.

Q. What advice do you have for IF fans who say they wish they could make money writing and producing adventure games?

I think it's unlikely anyone is going to make big bucks anymore writing text adventures. On the other hand, there's a CD-ROM adventure industry out there that could use an infusion of the enthusiasm for plot, character, internal consistency and so on that I see on the Web. There's no reason why graphic adventures have to be hoary old logic puzzles connected by video sequences. There's also plenty of opportunity to make money in that industry. The video and audio state of the art has advanced enormously in the last ten years, but the basic storytelling skills are in dire need of some new ideas. Maybe some of the IF fans out there will provide those ideas.

Go to the next page in this issue

Flip back to the previous page

Go to the XYZZYnews home page