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 pseudor...
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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...
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