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Zork
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
The original Zork game was written at the Programming Technology Division of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling starting in June 1977. It was more or less finished in September of the same year, but puzzles were added until 1979, the last bug fix in early 1981. It was written in MUDDLE aka MDL, a programming language not unlike LISP that ran only on PDP-10s. On some PDP-10s, that is. The last books on MDL were published in 1991.
1977 was the year the Colossal Cave Adventure in its final form swept the ARPAnet, and this was the main inspiration for Zork. Another inspiration was Dungeons & Dragons. Dave Lebling was an old D&D player and wanted less predictable battles. Thus Zork is, besides being a milestone of adventure gaming, also a step into the direction of CRPGs, several years before Rogue.
The quartet was rather protective of their source code, as protective as you can get on a system without security (those were the days). A hardware engineer at DEC who remains unnamed hacked up those puny efforts and translated the code to the somewhat more portable FORTRAN IV. In 1981, Randy Dietrich, Lynn Cochran, and Sig Peterson would translate this to FORTRAN 77, and ten years later Ian Lance Taylor to C. Both sources are readily available, usually under the name of Dungeon.
For Zork was not originally called Zork. Zork was just one of these nonsense words computer people are so fond of, like foobar. It was usually used as a verb, but also as a temporary name for all unfinished programs. If the game had a name at all, it was supposed to be Dungeon. There were trademark issues about the name Dungeon that probably would have been easy to overcome, but the team then decided that Zork was the better name anyway.
In 1979 or so they formed a company called Infocom and began thinking about ways to port their game to machines less expensive than a PDP-10. For in their time, text adventures were quite the resource hogs, which is why there are so relatively few on 8-bit systems.
The key to their design was an imaginary computer chip called theZ-machine.This chip would be able to run Zork (or at least part of it) if the program were coded in a special, very compact language. Then the design called for each personal computer to have a program (called a Z-machine Interpreter Program or ZIP) that would interpret the special Z-machine language and make the computer act the same way that a real Z-machine would. In order to get Zork written in this special language, another language was invented, called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), similar in many ways to MDL. Marc built a two-stage translator program that would translate a ZIL program, first into an assembly language and then further into the Z-machine language. He also built a ZIP so that a DECsystem-20 could emulate the Z-machine.—The History of Zork
This overview is by far not complete as far as platforms are concerned. There were Macintosh versions of all the games (see farther down), and the trilogy (the first three games) was available for a vast variety of platforms.
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![A][](../platform/apple.gif) |
PC |  |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zork I | 77 | 80 | 82 | Text | 83 | 85 | 86 | Zork II | 81 | 83 | Zork III | 82 | 84 |
| Beyond Zork | 87 | 87 | 87 | 87 | |||
| Zork Zero | 88 | 88 | EGA | 88 | |||
| Return to Zork | 93 | VGA | |||||
| Zork Nemesis | 96 | SVGA | |||||
| Zork Grand Inquisitor | 97 | ||||||
| Zork: The Undiscovered Underground | Text | 97 | |||||
The first three games are basically the original Zork game, taken apart and reduced in size so that it could run on 32K machines.
Beyond Zork was already a native PC game, it embraced some RPG aspects and used the extended IBM charset for a primitive automap and some status bars.
Zork Zero, while basically still a text adventure, ran in graphics mode (monochrome CGA, EGA, or even VGA). It is the oldest game I know that supports VGA, and unlike others of the time (like Sword of the Samurai, for example) it really uses the 256 colors, not just a slightly different 16 color palette. Mostly just providing decorative borders and a fancy font, graphics are also used for minigames and the illustrated Encyclopedia Frobozzica. Zork Zero has been considered the last true Zork game, though not necessarily a highlight of the series.
Return to Zork featured a point-and-click interface, live actors, and a choice of dialog tone, from friendly to threatening. Talking with people is more important than solving logical puzzles in this game, the first Zork game to be produced by Activision.
Zork Nemesis was strongly influenced by Myst and is very different from the other Zork games. A beautiful world, devoid of all life and demanding High Color graphics, and a near-complete lack of the weird Zork humor are its characteristics.
With Undiscovered Underground and Grand Inquisitor, the series returned to its roots. Undiscovered Underground is a pure text adventure and serves as a prequel to Grand Inquisitor, which features 3D graphics and some full motion video, but what both games have in common is a return of the classic Zorkian humor. Undiscovered Underground was available in a PC and Commodore 64 version, probably the last non-amateur game ever to be developed for this platform. As part of the PR for Grand Inquisitor, the Zork Trilogy was released as freeware.
There is a DVD version of Grand Inquisitor (1998) which includes Nemesis as a bonus. And that's how I came across these games: The DVD was included with my Philips DVD drive.
There are Macintosh versions of all the Zork games, this much I know. But it is extremely difficult to find out the exact release dates, which is why I did not include them in the table above.
From Zork Zero on, the games usually came out on the Mac pretty soon after they came out on the PC, except the last one, Zork Grand Inquisitor, which was released in late 2001, with far higher system requirements (G3 233MHz vs. Pentium 90/166).
As for the earlier, text-based games, I have no idea. A likely date for the first three is 1985, along with the Atari ST version.
As far as I know, the Mac is the only system still alive for which the "Dungeon" source was compiled.