Geoffrey Genz
| Geoffrey Genz | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Geoffrey Genz |
| Notability | Adventure author |
| Location | Colorado |
| Occupation | Software engineer |
Geoffrey Genz is the co-author of The Caves of Treasure Island (1980) and the author of The Caverns of the Sphinx (1981).
Background
In correspondence with Huw Williams in 2020, Genz recalls first using an Apple II when his junior high school purchased one when he was in 8th grade in the fall of 1978, which he used first to play games like Star Trek and Breakout, then later to write simple games of his own in Applesoft BASIC. His family soon got an Apple II+ and he spent many hours with his friend Paul Braun creating more custom games, consulting books like 101 BASIC Computer Games for tips and ideas.
Recalls Genz, "There must have been some local Apple club where we got the first two Eamon floppies... We played them obsessively. I think at a later meeting we got the next four and for a while that's all we knew about." During the summer or fall of 1980 Genz and Braun began developing their own adventure, coding it by hand since they lacked any developers tools or utilities. "We dissected the Lemonade Stand game to figure out how to do the music by POKEing the right addresses for the speaker," writes Genz. "I have no idea even how we did the map."
After delivering the completed Caves of Treasure Island to the local computer club, Genz and Braun got a new batch of Eamon disks and in a few months each started writing his own adventure. "We each had our own vision we wanted to play with," writes Genz, "but they were both done on my machine, and probably finished in mid to late 1981."
In 1983 Genz took his 15 or 16 game disks to college where he and his friends continued to play Eamon regularly. He gained his BA in Political Science, but after three years of law school and four years of law practice returned to the computer field, working first as the "computer guy" for a Denver distribution company, then moving into software engineering. Genz is currently a Principal Engineer with Comcast Cable.
Other projects
In the 1990s Genz was a Senior Wizard for the Realms MUD and built a lot of content including a puzzle-filled mission acknowledged as the best quest in the game. Genz says he'd love to port the mission to a modern platform should he ever find enough free time for it.
Genz is also the creator of Lampost, a text-based, multi-user virtual world platform that allows players to interact with MUD-like text environments entirely in their browsers without need of any special clients or terminal emulators. Lampost is managed and made available through GitHub.