The Micro Group

“I became one of the few, the proud, the implementors.”

— Brian Moriarty, on being promoted to a full-fledged Infocom game designer.

In the spring of 2022, I interviewed Brian Moriarty about his life leading up to, and including, the creation of the Infocom classic Trinity. This is the fifth episode produced from those sessions. Unfortunately, due to challenges in the way the interview had to be conducted, the audio is somewhat poor. Every effort has been made to clean the audio, but, the end result is still very rough.

If you’d like to play Trinity before listening to this spoiler-laden podcast, I have posted a guide to help get you started.

In addition to the audio, below you will find visuals referred to in the episode so you can see what they look like when Moriarty refers to them.

Visual References for This Episode:

The “Infocom barn” as it appears today in Google Street View. Brian lived in the front room on the top floor, and Jeff O'Neill lived in the front-right room on the bottom floor.

Brian leaning against Infocom’s DECSYSTEM-20 (from Wikipedia)

Marc Blank (left) and Jerry Wolper (right) in the basement of 55 Wheeler St., the room which housed the microcomputers Brian and the other micro group programmers used for interpreter development.

The split-screen “sonar” display used in Seastalker for which Brian had to retrofit the Z-machine interpreters (Commodore 64 screenshot from Mobygames)