video game: Apple II Cyborg

Originally released by Sentient Software in 1981, Cyborg is an interactive fiction game that puts the player in the role of a human merged with an artificial intelligence. The player must explore the game to find an energy source to stay alive. The game was updated with graphics and re-released by Broderbund in 1984.

This item is part of a donation from of game designers Michael and Muffy Berlyn. A novelist, Michael began his career in games in 1979 after playing Colossal Cave Adventure. Together with his wife Muffy, who was also a writer as well as an artist, he founded the company Sentient Software. In 1981, they released their first games, Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Michael then moved to Infocom, where he worked on a number of games including Infidel, Cutthroats, and the computer-board game mash-up Fooblitzky. Infocom’s no-spouse policy meant that Muffy couldn’t work there, so in 1985 they founded Brainwave Productions and released a number of games including Tass Times in Tonetown, whose quirky sensibilities influenced many graphic adventures of the 1980s and 1990s, including those from Lucas Arts. In 1993, Michael started a company called Eidetic with infocom founder Marc Blank, which produced games such as Bubsy 3D and the Syphon Filter franchise, as well as games for the Newton handheld. More recently, the Berlyns have published a series of app games for iOS and Windows.