“The great thing about the old machines that I really miss is that, if you spent a year with it, you could master the machine. You could control it down to the cycle level. If you really got into it, you could do the impossible with those machines if you learned it well enough.”
— Brian Moriarty on learning to program in assembly language on the Atari 800.
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 third episode produced from those sessions. Unfortunately, due to challenges in the way the interview had to be conducted, the audio for the first three episodes is very 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 Whitinsville, MA branch of The Fair - the final location Brian worked as a store detective prior to quitting. Note that “The Fair” in this case was a local discount store chain that existed only in the Worcester, MA area. It is not affiliated with the “The Fair Store”, a department store in Chicago, IL.
A (poor quality) image of Star Raiders being played on a CRT, as it might have looked when Brian originally saw it at BOSE.
The packaging for Scott Adams’ text adventure game, Strange Odyssey. There are multiple versions of the cover artwork for this game, but this specific cover is the one that appears on the copy Brian bought at the A.N.A.L.O.G. store.
Historical photograph of Atari hardware on display at the A.N.A.L.O.G. store, as it might have looked around the time Brian frequented the store. Image appears courtesy of publisher Lee Pappas’s on-line archive.
Anaglyphic 3D glasses of the kind Brian would have received as a child when he went to the theater to see The Mask.
Top of page 68 of A.N.A.L.O.G. Issue 7, showing Brian’s first published article for the magazine. You can read the full article on-line at the Internet Archive.
A frame from the commercial Brian hand-coded for BOSE on the Atari 800.
The original packaging for Deadline, as Brian would have purchased it at The Bit Bucket. Image appears courtesy of The Digital Antiquarian.
The World's First CG Commercial