Zork

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File:Zork screenshot.png
Zork can run on modern Z-machine interpreters, as well as the older models it was made for originally.

Zork, one of the first works of interactive fiction (a form of adventure game), was an early descendent of ADVENT (also known as Colossal Cave). The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language. All four were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group.

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck.

Three of the original Zork programmers joined with others to found Infocom in 1979. That company adapted the PDP-10 Zork into Zork I-III, a trilogy of games for most popular computers of the era, including the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bit family, the TRS-80 and the IBM PC. Zork I was published on 5¼" and 8" floppy disk. Joel Berez and Marc Blank developed a specialized virtual machine to run Zork I, called the Z-machine. The trilogy was written in ZIL, which stands for "Zork Implementation Language". Personal Software published what would become the first part of the trilogy under the name Zork when it was first released in 1980, but Infocom later handled the distribution of that game and their subsequent games.

Zork is set in a sprawling underground labyrinth. The player is a nameless adventurer, whose goal is to find the treasures hidden in the caves and return with them alive. The dungeons are stocked with many novel creatures and objects, among them grues and zorkmids. The Zork universe and timeline has been extended by Infocom's other works of interactive fiction.

Zork and its relatives are works of interactive fiction. Zork distinguished itself in its genre as an especially rich game, in terms of both the quality of the storytelling and the sophistication of its text parser, which was not limited to simple verb-noun commands ("hit grue"), but understood full sentences ("hit the grue with the sword").

The original Zork Trilogy:

  • Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980 - Text) by Infocom
  • Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (1981 - Text) by Infocom
  • Zork III: The Dungeon Master (1982 - Text) by Infocom

Later additions to the series:

A series of original novels based upon the Zork universe were also published in the mid-1980s.

See also

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