Programming Throwdown, Episode 69.

Puzzle games. Take it away, Mark and Patrick.

Hi everyone. We're here with Mark Engelberg, Puzzleinventor.

Nice. Mark, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what you're up to?

Hi, it's great to be here. I studied computer science and cognitive science at

Rice University, and somewhere in the middle of my sophomore year of college, I read an article

about virtual reality. This was in the very early 1990s. So there weren't many people doing virtual reality.

There weren't many people talking about it.

But I read an article and I thought, wow, this sounds awesome.

I want to be a part of this.

I had kind of grown up playing adventure games, text adventure games.

Oh, like Zork?

Like Zork.

Yeah, colossal cave, those kinds of things.

And then transitioned when text adventure games kind of became graphical adventure games, like by Sierra, for example, Kings Quest and Space Quest and leisure suit Larry and all those games.

Police Quest.

They were just wonderful games.

And I loved those kinds of games, that melding of story and puzzles.

And to me, virtual reality was the obvious next step for this kind of stuff.

And of course, I also grew up watching Star Trek Next Generation with a

holodeck and everything. And I was convinced that someday there's going to be this studio

where they're going to be making these virtual reality adventure games for people to play.

...