Tim Anderson (programmer): Difference between revisions

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==Career==
While attending [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]], Anderson got his start in game development by developing the game ''Trivia'' (1976) alongside future collaborator [[Marc Blank]] for the [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] [[PDP-10]], the school's mainframe, playable over [[ARPANET]].<ref name=zorkhist>{{Cite web |last=Anderson |first=Tim |last2=Galley |first2=Stu |title=The History of Zork |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090116035446/http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html |access-date=June 27, 2023}}</ref> ''Trivia'' found populalarity on ARPANET, leading Anderson and Blank, as well as [[Bruce Daniels]] and [[Dave Lebling]] to collaborate on a new game: ''Zork''. All four were members of the Dynamic Modeling Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.<ref name=zorkhist/> Originally developed from 1977 to 1979 in the [[MDL programming language]] for the PDP-10, ''Zork'' would prove immensely popular on ARPANET.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Lammle |first=Rob |date=June 15, 2014 |title=A Brief History of Zork |url=https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29885/eaten-grue-brief-history-zork}}</ref> After the success of ''Zork'' on it's limited platform, Anderson and the other members of the team founded [[Infocom]], initially with no actual business plans, but settling on [[porting]] ''Zork'' to home computers.<ref name=zorkhist/><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Nooney |first=Laine |date=Fall 2017 |title=Let's Begin Again |journal=American Journal of Play |volume=10}}</ref><ref name=down>{{cite journal |last1=Briceno |first1=Hector |last2=Chao |first2=Wesley |last3=Glenn |first3=Andrew |last4=Hu |first4=Stanley |last5=Krishnamurthy |first5=Ashwin |last6=Tsuchida |first6=Bruce |title=Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. |date=December 15, 2000}}</ref>
 
The home computer ports of ''Zork'' would prove immensely successful, and Infocom grew rapidly, focusing on producing new text adventures, as well as branching out into business software.<ref name=down/> The company's expansion into business software ultimately caused them to de-emphasize game production, which lead to their eventual demise in 1989.<ref name=down/><ref>{{cite web |title=Stick to What You Know: Infocom and the Perils of Expansion |url=https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/computer-games/16/196 |website=The Computer History Museum}}</ref>