The History and Future of Zork

Matt Barton writes "I thought folks might be interested in my History of Zork feature on Gamasutra. I interviewed three of the original 'imps' for the piece (you can read the full interviews online) as well as Nick Montfort (author of Twisty Little Passages) and Howard Sherman (president of Malinche Entertainment). The article covers the original trilogy, as well as Enchanter and the later Activision games such as Zork: Grand Inquisitor."

Good times

[wandazulu]

I played Zork the way it was meant to be played..on a PDP-11 with a DecWriter for a screen. Ah, if only I hadn't thrown away all those printouts...

The real thing for me was that it represented a whole Universe...so many games have their own tiny world and outside of that particular game, it doesn't exist. Zork, I think, really developed the concept of a "world of Zork" that included its own history (hysterically told in the manuals that came with the games) and the Zorkmid shows up in a couple of other games as well. I really felt like I was in a whole other world, that games like WoW do very well graphically, but then it was all up to the imagination, the images of, 25+ years on, I still have; I can still see that white house now the way I first imagined it.

I haven't played the actual game in probably 15 years, but I almost don't need to..it's like that happy memory of good times that just stays with you and doesn't fade.

Re:What game ist that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am pretty sure that it is from Return To Zork, a brave attempt to push Zork into the mulitmedia era. It's quite ok really, but it was mightily frustrating that it is possible that near the end of the game you notice that you did a certain thing wrong which forces you to play it from the beginning again. (hint: it had to do with a plant). You'd never encounter that kind of sadistic problem in a LucasArts game.

Adventure FTW

[Pvt_Waldo]

The original Adventure/Collosal Caves was to me the real innovator and original. Zork was just a derivative work of it that made it commercial. Adventure is the classic, Zork just the commercialized imitator.

Re:Adventure FTW

[tuffy]

Zork's text parsing was far superior to Adventure's, and Infocom's ability to port it (in pieces) from the PDP-10 to the many microcomputers of the time was in itself and innovative achievement.

Original Zork Source Code in MDL

[SimHacker]

Zork was the reason I got on the ARPANET, back around 1980 or so. I was using Bruce's Northstar BBS that had an adventure game that Bruce had written in Basic, and he told me how to play Zork: first, dial up the NBS TIP, connect to MIT-AI (the command was "@L 134", because the ARPANET had 8 bit host numbers, and AI was 134), and apply for an account to learn Lisp. Once that was granted, I connected to MIT-DM ("@L 70"), and logged in as URANUS, password RINGS, used :CHUNAME to change my user name, and waited until one of the two people playing Zork quit, to take their slot. Later somebody told me the magic words to use to get an account on DM, so I applied for my own account on DM, claiming that I wanted to "Learn MDL for calculus and algebraic applications". The source code to Zork was well hidden. DM ran a weird version of ITS that had some kind of file security or cloaking, it was rumored. I was always looking for the Zork sources, but never found it on DM.

Years later I googled for a unique phrase that was only in the original DM version of Zork, and this URL popped up: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/ [retro.co.za]

The original MDL source to Zork is really beautiful code that's almost as fun to read as it was to play. I had discovered a bug in the InfoCom version of Zork, which turned out to be in the original sources. When you're fighting the troll who's wielding an Axe, you can give anything to the troll and he will eat it. So I tried "give axe to troll" and he ate his axe, then cowered in the corner! Better yet you can go "give troll to troll" and he will eat himself and disappear, unfortunately not clearing the troll bit that is required to leave the room, so if you try to leave it prints a message saying the troll fends you off with a menacing gesture, and stops you from leaving. Sure enough, in the original sources, there is a troll bit!

From http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/dung.mud [retro.co.za]:

<OBJECT ["TROLL"]
["NASTY"]
"troll"
<+ ,OVISON ,VICBIT ,VILLAIN>
TROLL
(<GET-OBJ "AXE">)
(ODESC1
"A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages
out of the room."
OSTRENGTH 2
OFMSGS ,TROLL-MELEE)>

<PSETG FLAG-NAMES
<UVECTOR TROLL-FLAG
LOW-TIDE
DOME-FLAG
GLACIER-FLAG
ECHO-FLAG
RIDDLE-FLAG
LLD-FLAG
CYCLOPS-FLAG
MAGIC-FLAG
RAINBOW
GNOME-DOOR
CAROUSEL-FLIP
CAGE-SOLVE
BANK-SOLVE
EGG-SOLVE
SING-SONG
CPSOLVE
PALAN-SOLVE
SLIDE-SOLVE>>

<PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">

<ROOM "MTROL"

"This is a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls."
"The Troll Room"
<EXIT "WEST" "CELLA"
"EAST" "NORTH" "SOUTH" (<GET-OBJ "TROLL">)>

-Don

Re:Good times

[harrkev]

As I recall, they had planned out the game and then at the last minute decided to shoehorn it into a "Zork" box just to increase sales. From the start, it was not designed as a Zork game. And it really isn't Zork, and it shows. There are no flatheads, and the game is too gruesome (no relation to the grue).

MUD

[TheSciBoy]

Almost as old a concept as Zork itself (not really, but probably as old as or older than WWW) is MUD, Multi User Dungeon. Text based, the point of the game was a sort of Munchkin-role-playing where you were supposed to gain levels quickly in order to become powerful enough to get allowed to write your own areas to the game. This is basically where the basis for all modern MMORPG's come from. Except no WoW player is likely to be allowed to add his/her own areas to the game.

Anyway, look it up. There are most likely some of these still active. You can download them and start a server yourself.

When I studied at the university in the late nineties people where still playing MUD all night, and it was considered an old kind of game back then.