He was natural inside Washington, D.C., grew up in Maryland, and attended MIT, where he obtained a degree in political science before becoming a member of its Laboratory for Computer Science.

When encountering a original Adventure game (also known as Colossal Cave), he was fascinated per construct &—together using Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, & Bruce Daniels—placed bent on write an escapade game sustaining the better parser, which became Zork. Within 1979 he became one of the founders of Infocom.

His games include Zork I-III, Starcross, Enchanter, Suspect, Spellbreaker, The Lurking Horror and ''James Clavell's Shogun''.

When Infocom's prevent inside 1989, Lebling worked on the GUI spreadsheet program, joined Avid (a company doing favorite results for broadcast & film), & intentional server applications at Ucentric.