A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing Adventures

“I think I was there ten minutes and he had already decided to hire me, and I was never so happy in my life.”

— Brian Moriarty, on Dan Horn hiring him to work at Infocom.

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 fourth 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.

In this episode, you will hear Brian refer to Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer as if it has not yet been released. This is because the interview took place in 2022, whereas the movie was not released until 2023.

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:

Screen capture from an emulated Atari 8-bit version of Choplifter!.

A blurry capture of Brian’s badge-disk for John Romero’s “Apple ][ Reunion”.

Top of the first page of The Black Rabbit article in A.N.A.L.O.G. Issue 9. The entire article is available online at The Internet Archive.

Screen capture from an emulated version of Adventure in the 5th Dimension.

Example of the four-letter-word/ID encoding used in Adventure in the 5th Dimension. The source, in BASIC, appears online at The Internet Archive.

Lee Pappas holding up the artwork he had commissioned which lead to Brian’s decision to make Crash Dive.

Screen capture from an emulated version of Crash Dive.

Photograph of the “virtual feelies” that Brian envisioned for Crash Dive!. Since the magazine couldn’t come with actual feelies, this picture appeared alongside the Crash Dive! source listing in A.N.A.L.O.G. Issue 18.