Overview:

Brian Moriarty, the trailblazing author of influential Infocom games like Trinity and Beyond Zork, will be delivering a Classic Game Postmortem on the groundbreaking 1990 graphic adventure game Loom at GDC 2015. Moriarty currently serves as a Professor of Practice in Game Design at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and his lengthy game development career spans stints at Infocom, Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts), Rocket Science, Mpath/HearMe, and other ventures. Now he's coming to GDC in March to speak at length about the development of Loom, a remarkably mature fantasy with an innovative musical interface, and a flexible, beginner-friendly design that was the first to embody what would become the LucasArts philosophy: that players should never have to deal with dead ends, accidental deaths or forced restarts. His lecture will survey the entire history of the project, from conception to shipping, together with amusing production anecdotes, little-known facts, and rare artifacts from his personal collection of Lucasfilm memorabilia