Brian Moriarty

Brian Moriarty (born 1956) is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986), and Beyond Zork (1987), as well as Loom (1990) for LucasArts.

Prior to joining Infocom, Moriarty was a Technical Editor for the Atari 8-bit computer magazine ANALOG Computing. He wrote two text adventures for ANALOG: Adventure in the 5th Dimension (1983) and Crash Dive! (1984). He also worked on Tachyon (1985), an adaptation of Atari's Quantum arcade game, which was previewed but never published.

Moriarty joined Lucasfilm Games, later known as LucasArts, in 1988 at the invitation of Noah Falstein. There he designed his first graphic adventure game, Loom, published in 1990. Though the game was a commercial success and Moriarty had an idea for sequels which were briefly entertained, he opted to move on to other projects.

After working on an unreleased game based on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for the studio's educational division, he took over The Dig, a science fiction adventure game based on an idea from Steven Spielberg. The project had a notoriously lengthy and troubled development, with Moriarty leading the second of ultimately three incarnations the game underwent before finally shipping in 1995. When his version of the project collapsed in 1993, Moriarty departed LucasArts and joined the now defunct Rocket Science.

On occasion, Moriarty delivers public lectures, one of which has been turned into an amateur dramatic production. He is currently a professor of Interactive Media and Game Design at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

ANALOG Computing

• Adventure in the 5th Dimension (1983)
• Crash Dive! (1984)
• Tachyon (1985, unpublished)

Infocom

• Wishbringer (1985)
• Trinity (1986)
• Beyond Zork (1987)
• Timesink (unpublished)

Lucasfilm Games / LucasArts Entertainment

• Loom (1990)
• Forge (pitch only)
• The Fold (pitch only)
• Young Indiana Jones at the World's Fair (unpublished)
• The Dig (1995)

Rocket Science Games

• Loadstar: The Legend Of Tully Bodine (1994) - Credited for "interactive design."

• The Black Rabbit (1982, Atari 8-bit) - single-drive disk duplicator
• Snail (1983, Atari 8-bit) - disk drive RPM checker
• mUSE: A BASIC Memory Monitor (1983, Atari 8-bit) - programming utility