Marc Blank

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 City (he received his MD degree in 1979).

He and several friends spent the next year developing a specialized computer language that they could use to program text adventures like Zork on then-new microcomputers (with far less capabilities than the PDP-10).

Blank 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, to promote the release of Activision's graphical game Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

[2] As Newton sales slowed, Eidetic changed gears to focus on PC and PlayStation games, producing Bubsy 3D in 1996 and Syphon Filter in 1999.