Marc Blank

Career

Marc Blank first played the mainframe game Adventure, created by Don Woods and Will Crowther, while a student at MIT in the mid-1970s. What frustrated him was how few words the computer understood when he typed commands. He mulled this over during his undergraduate years and eventually began building his own adventure game using MDL, a programming language developed at MIT. While studying medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, Blank and a small group of friends wrote the first version of Zork on a PDP-10. He earned his MD in 1979 but chose not to practice medicine, instead sticking with Zork. Over the following year, he and his collaborators created a new programming language tailored for text adventures on early microcomputers, which were far less powerful than the PDP-10. They founded Infocom to publish Zork and other games. Beyond the three Zork titles, Blank designed Deadline, Enchanter, Fooblitzky, Border Zone, and Journey: The Quest Begins.

In 1993, Blank co-founded Blank, Berlyn and Co. with fellow Infocom writer Michael Berlyn. The company later became Eidetic after Russ Wetmore, a former Apple employee, joined as a third partner to help program Notion for the Apple Newton. Eidetic started by releasing productivity software for the Newton, and Notion, a list manager, became a hit that was eventually included with every Newton device. Blank returned to text adventures in 1997 when Activision producer Eddie Dombrower asked him and Berlyn to create Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, a small promotional game tied to the release of the graphical Zork: Grand Inquisitor. As Newton sales declined, Eidetic shifted to PC and PlayStation games, producing Bubsy 3D in 1996 and Syphon Filter in 1999. Sony bought Eidetic in 2000 for an undisclosed amount.

Blank left Sony in 2004 to focus on ChatterEmail, an email client for the Treo smartphone. He announced in February 2007 that he would no longer work on it actively. He then joined Palm, which had acquired ChatterEmail, and led the design and implementation of the Palm Pre’s email application. From 2010 to 2012, he worked in Google’s Android group, and from 2012 to 2018, he served as a Principal Engineer at Lab126, Amazon’s hardware division. In 2013, Blank and Dave Lebling received the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Pioneer Award for their work on Zork.