Written by Joe Pranevich
In the beginning, there was Colossal Cave. Lots of people played and enjoyed it but some brave adventurers were inspired. These adventurers, mostly college students, started to create their own adventure games on the systems that they had access to. Many of those have been lost to history, but one such project became a legend: Zork. This is not the story of the commercial Zork games which launched Infocom but rather their predecessor, a text adventure created by four procrastinating college kids who just wanted to see if they could do it. This game would not be as well-known as its commercial descendants, but I can think of no better place to start our marathon than at the very beginning.
Our story begins in beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts. Around 1977, a group of four students at MIT’s computer science laboratory were fans of Colossal Cave and Dungeons & Dragons and wanted to build a game in the spirit of both. They didn’t have a name for their project but they had a made-up word that they used for their other in-progress projects: Zork. The four would-be game designers were Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. Tim and Marc had previously collaborated on a network game, Trivia, while Dave had worked on an action game called Maze, but this their first attempts at a text adventure. They didn’t create a fully-formed Zork all at once, the game gradually developed over the next two years as more and more puzzles were added and the core software improved. The game reached its “final” form in 1979 although bug fixes would continue on the software until 1981. Several of the now former MIT students founded Infocom in 1979 and built the consumer version of Zork, but we’ll get to that story when we talk about Zork I.
We will not be playing this original PDP-10 version but rather its very close cousin. In 1978, an intrepid hacker (in both senses of the word) managed to get his hands on the source code to Zork, something the original designers had tried to keep secret. This semi-anonymous hacker (known as “Bob”) painstakingly translated the entire source code from “Muddle”, the LISP-like programming language the game was based on, to FORTRAN. This was difficult work, but it allowed the game to be run on a wider array of platforms. This version was forked during a brief period when Zork was known as Dungeon and that is the name that has stuck. The intrepid hacker kept his version up to date as the original added new puzzles and he tried to make it as close an experience as possible. Rather than play the PDP-10 original, I will be playing this fork. According to the documentation, the only difference is that the FORTRAN version has a less sophisticated parser. If anyone knows of other differences, please let me know.
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| The marathon begins! |
Our story begins in beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts. Around 1977, a group of four students at MIT’s computer science laboratory were fans of Colossal Cave and Dungeons & Dragons and wanted to build a game in the spirit of both. They didn’t have a name for their project but they had a made-up word that they used for their other in-progress projects: Zork. The four would-be game designers were Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. Tim and Marc had previously collaborated on a network game, Trivia, while Dave had worked on an action game called Maze, but this their first attempts at a text adventure. They didn’t create a fully-formed Zork all at once, the game gradually developed over the next two years as more and more puzzles were added and the core software improved. The game reached its “final” form in 1979 although bug fixes would continue on the software until 1981. Several of the now former MIT students founded Infocom in 1979 and built the consumer version of Zork, but we’ll get to that story when we talk about Zork I.
We will not be playing this original PDP-10 version but rather its very close cousin. In 1978, an intrepid hacker (in both senses of the word) managed to get his hands on the source code to Zork, something the original designers had tried to keep secret. This semi-anonymous hacker (known as “Bob”) painstakingly translated the entire source code from “Muddle”, the LISP-like programming language the game was based on, to FORTRAN. This was difficult work, but it allowed the game to be run on a wider array of platforms. This version was forked during a brief period when Zork was known as Dungeon and that is the name that has stuck. The intrepid hacker kept his version up to date as the original added new puzzles and he tried to make it as close an experience as possible. Rather than play the PDP-10 original, I will be playing this fork. According to the documentation, the only difference is that the FORTRAN version has a less sophisticated parser. If anyone knows of other differences, please let me know.
