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All Related Images To adventure game fans, Brian Moriarty is a legend who needs no introduction. He is best known as the creator of Loom, a graphical adventure game released by Lucasfilm Games in 1990. Fans of interactive fiction, however, may better remember him as the author of Trinity, Wishbringer, and Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor. To his fans, he is also known as "Professor" Moriarty--a nickname given to him as a young boy, in homage to the arch-nemesis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character. Born in 1956, Moriarty joined Infocom in 1984 where he began his career as a game designer. More than 20 years later, Moriarty still maintains an active connection with his fan base, who continues to reminisce about playing his games. We are extremely privileged to have this exclusive interview with the famed game designer. In the interview, Moriarty speaks of his past with Infocom and Lucasfilm Games, his work on Loom and its lost sequels, his current view of adventure games, and what holds for him in the future. In 1978, you were studying English at Southeastern Massachusetts University. I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I graduated. Typography and graphics were interesting to me, and I almost dropped out of my senior year when a local printer offered me a job. I was certainly interested in computers -- I actually designed and built some toy computers when I was still in grade school -- but, aside from pocket calculators, I never set eyes on a real computer throughout my college years. When and how did your career in the game industry begin? My first job out of college was as a sales clerk at an old Radio Shack store in Worcester, Massachusetts. On my first day of work, they brought in a carton containing a TRS-80 Model I, the first mass-market microcomputer. Within a few days, I had learned to program the thing in BASIC and wrote a crude fortune-telling game. Then I taught myself Z-80 assembler and experimented with animated ASCII graphics. But when I left the job, my interest in micros faded for a few years. Later, in 1981, I was working as a technical writer at Bose Corporation (the loudspeaker manufacturer). One of my co-workers brought in an Atari 800 micro to run VisiCalc. From that moment, I became a hopeless computer game fanatic. Looking around for a place to buy my own Atari 800, I learned about a small dealer nearby. It turned out that this dealer was also publishing a hobbyist magazine about the Atari system. Within a few months, I took a huge cut in pay to become the technical editor of the little magazine, which was called ANALOG Computing. That meant, among other things, that I got to play and review "Lots Of Games." One of the first I tried was a Scott Adams text adventure called Strange Odyssey. Although the writing and parser were very crude, the possibilities of the genre got me very excited. As an English major, I could imagine a whole new form of interactive literature; and as a programmer, the potential for improving the technology was obvious. Soon thereafter, I came across Infocom's Deadline, Suspended and Starcross, with their sophisticated parsers and classy packaging. My earliest adventure games appeared in the pages of ANALOG. The first, Adventure in the 5th Dimension, was written in Atari BASIC with a bit of 6502 assembly. These titles were quite rudimentary, but they helped me land that job at Infocom I was dreaming about. They hired me in spring of 1984 as a microcomputer engineer, writing and improving game interpreters for the Atari, Apple, Commodore and Tandy machines. Within six months, I was promoted to Implementor, which is what they called their game authors. It was a tradition at Infocom to have an Implementors Lunch every Tuesday. Seated at the table around me were Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, co-authors of the original Zork; and Douglas Adams, who was working with Steve on the soon-to-be-released game based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. To an avid gamer like me, this was like being invited to tea at Abbey Road with the Beatles! What games had you authored and co-authored up to that time? How different was the work experience at Lucasfilm Games as compared to Infocom? My first Infocom game, Wishbringer, came out in 1985 and was very successful. I wrote two other fantasies for Infocom, Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987), and also worked on Bureaucracy a bit. In retrospect, Infocom was the best work experience I have ever had. Most of them were MIT graduates, and many were experts in computer languages and compiler design. Their standards were high, and their taste in matters technical and artistic was often impeccable. Back in those days, companies weren't afraid to have office parties with alcohol. Infocom threw one every Friday, with major events once a month and on holidays. There was also a dark, greasy Polynesian restaurant nearby that served fruity cocktails like Mai Tais and Zombies, vile but potent. I fear some of those gatherings may have gotten out of hand. Most of us were still in our twenties, unmarried and foolish. By the time I left, it was a struggling division of a hostile corporate parent, housed in a tall, bland building in an anonymous office complex. Imagine the shock of moving from there to the rolling hills and conspicuous wealth of Skywalker Ranch! In summer of 1988, Lucasfilm Games had only about twenty employees. The company had attracted a team of clever designers, including Ron Gilbert, David Fox, Noah Falstein and Larry Holland, among others. Lucasfilm didn't party as hard as Infocom, but there was a relaxed, easygoing attitude that I soon learned was typical of Marin County, California. Ron had devised a development platform for graphic adventure games -- the SCUMM system -- that was very advanced for its time. It wasn't long before I started learning SCUMM to see what I could do with it. The fundamental inspiration for the game was the title itself. It suggests weaving, but also "looming" in the sense of towering over something, evoking mountains, power and menace. It also shares the sound of words that bring to mind feelings of darkness and secrecy, such as gloom, womb and tomb. Out of this line of thought came the Weavers, an ancient craft guild secretly managing the fabric of reality. Throw in a dose of Mythology 101, an undead bad guy and my trademark fondness for extra dimensions, and you get what eventually became Loom, the game. Once the basic concept was settled, I discussed it with Gary Winnick, the lead animator, and Mark Ferrari, the background artist. We found ourselves gravitating towards Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty as a model for the look and feel of the game. Sleeping Beauty has a very distinct aesthetic, unlike any other Disney film. The production designer for the film was Eyvand Earle, a painter known for his flat, stylized shapes and planes. Mark did an amazing job adapting this look to the 16-color EGA pallette. The other major influence was Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake. The majestic sweep and melancholy atmosphere seemed perfect for a wistful story like Loom. All of the music for the game was transcribed note-by-note from Tchaikovsky's score. I also borrowed the swans, the owls and a few other elements from the scenario of the ballet. You had previously said that Loom was the first game of a planned trilogy adventure, followed by Forge and The Fold. What tie over in the characters (such as Bobbin Threadbare) would exist in the sequels? But after it was finished, there was vague interest in continuing the story. It tells the story of Bobbin's friend Rusty Nailbender, whose home city (the Forge of the Blacksmiths) was enslaved by Chaos near the end of Loom. Rusty becomes the leader of an underground movement to overthrow Chaos, together with Fleece Firmflanks of the Shepherds and new characters from the other Guilds. Bobbin appears every now and then as a ghostly swan dispensing mystical advice, an obvious nod to Obi-Wan Kanobi of Star Wars. The story climaxes in a terrible battle that nearly destroys the world. The third game, The Fold, is about Fleece Firmflanks and her attempt to unite the shattered...
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