She is best known for creating Plundered Hearts, an interactive fiction computer game published by Infocom in 1987. A Minnesota native, she graduated from Macalester College in 1984 with a B.A. in English, specializing in British literature. Already a fan of Infocom's games, Briggs joined the company in 1985 as a game tester. Working long hours playtesting games and learning the ZIL programming language, she quickly rose to the rank of Implementor.
Briggs's literary background led her to write the company's only romance-genre text adventure. She also chose an explicitly female lead character, again unique for Infocom (other lead characters were either of unspecified gender, male, or allowed a choice of sex). She explained these choices by saying, "C. S. Lewis said he had to write The Chronicles of Narnia because they were books he wanted to read, and nobody else had written them yet. Plundered Hearts was a game I wanted to play."
Amy Briggs worked as a writer and editor on a number of other Infocom projects: she did a major rewrite of Quarterstaff, and helped to design "The Flathead Calendar", the main feelie included with Zork Zero. Following the closure of Infocom, she eventually retired from the video game industry, earning a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Minnesota, then working for 3M as a human factors engineer.
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