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 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). Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but elected to continue with
Zork. 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). They founded the new company,
Infocom, to publish the game and more like it. Aside from
Zork I,
II, and
III, he designed
Deadline,
Enchanter,
Fooblitzky,
Border Zone, and
Journey: The Quest Begins In 1993 he founded Blank, Berlyn and Co. with former Infocom writer
Michael Berlyn. The company's name was later changed to
Eidetic after former Apple Employee [Russ Wetmore] joined as the third partner, to help program Notion, for the Apple Newton. Eidetic initially published
productivity software for the
Apple Newton. Eidetic's
Notion: The Newton List Manager became a hit and was ultimately bundled in all Newtons. 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. As Newton sales slowed, Eidetic changed gears to focus on
PC and
PlayStation games, producing
Bubsy 3D in 1996 and
Syphon Filter in 1999. In 2000
Sony acquired Eidetic for an undisclosed sum. Blank left Sony in 2004, where he focused on his email client for the
Treo smartphone, ChatterEmail. On February 22, 2007, Blank announced he would no longer be "actively" working on ChatterEmail. Blank subsequently joined Palm, Inc. (who acquired ChatterEmail) and led the design and implementation of the Palm Pre's Email application. He worked in the
Android group at
Google from 2010 to 2012, and as a Principal Engineer at
Lab126 (
Amazon.com) from 2012 to 2018. In 2013 Blank and
Dave Lebling were awarded the
Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Pioneer Award for their work on
Zork. ==References==