Dave Lebling

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Dave Lebling, circa 2002

P. David Lebling (born 1949) was an interactive fiction game designer, or "implementor", at Infocom.

He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Maryland, and attended MIT, where he obtained a degree in political science before becoming a member of its Laboratory for Computer Science.

After encountering the original Adventure game (also called Colossal Cave), he was fascinated by the concept and—together with Marc Blank, Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels—set out to write an adventure game with a better parser, which became Zork. In 1979 he became one of the founders of Infocom.

His games include Zork I, II and III, Starcross, Suspect, Spellbreaker, The Lurking Horror and James Clavell's Shogun.

After Infocom's end in 1989, Lebling worked on a GUI spreadsheet program, joined Avid (a company doing special effects for broadcast and film), and designed server applications at Ucentric.