Zork was a conceptual descendant of AdventureGame, one of the first such, and for many years, by far the most sophisticated such. It was text-based InteractiveFiction at its finest. It originated on DEC-10 mainframes at MIT in the late 1970s and was written in MDL language (pronounced "muddle"), a very powerful Lisp variant that incorporated ideas from MicroPlanner (think Prolog crossed with Lisp).

It featured a fairly powerful natural language parser (sentences with multiple phrases, compound nouns, etc), autonomous agents (timer event driven), and a host of other features that appeared in no other text adventure games for many years.

The game was later ported (rewritten, actually, with extreme difficulty) to PCs, published by Infocom and spawned a host of sequels back in the early to mid 80s. 

Some of the ideas used to program Zork for PCs sound like primitive Java. Each "Object" was declared and could have 'attributes', the source was compiled into a ByteCode which could be used by any platform. The games ran on a "Z-Machine" (simulated virtual machine) which operated the same on any platform, from CommodoreSixtyfour to mainframe to PalmVx.

Infocom was swallowed by Activision. Once computers could create 'FirstPersonShooter''''''s', text-based interactive fiction pretty much died out.

The game and language still live in a reversed-engineered compiler called "Inform" which can be found at InformLanguage.

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''Zork is the reason I first touched a computer and the reason I learned to type.'' -- SeanOleary

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I seem to recall that there was a FortranLanguage (?) version that ran under 4.2BSD that preceded the Infocom version. And that was probably ported from elsewhere. Anybody else have more details?

''Yes--Zork was a port of the FORTRAN game known as "Dungeon".''

''Not true--Dungeon was the FORTRAN clone of Zork. It did not precede the original mainframe Zork, though it definitely preceded any home computer versions, and, indeed, the formation of Infocom as a company.''

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CategoryGame CategoryInteractiveFiction