Zork
1977 · Text Adventure · PDP-10 / Multiple
Overview
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure.
Deep Dive
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
Developer Story
Zork was created between 1977 and 1979 by four MIT programmers — Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling — on a PDP-10 mainframe. The team were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group and wrote Zork as a successor to Colossal Cave Adventure. Blank and Anderson later co-founded Infocom, which commercialised Zork in 1980 and went on to publish some of the most sophisticated interactive fiction of the 1980s.
Did You Know?
- Zork's parser understood complex English sentences — "put the sword in the trophy case" — at a time when most games accepted only two-word commands.
- The name "Zork" was MIT hacker slang for an unfinished or poorly functioning program — the creators used it as a placeholder and it stuck.
- The original mainframe Zork was 1MB in size — far too large for home computers, so Infocom split it into three separate games for commercial release.
- "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." — the grue warning became one of the most quoted lines in gaming history.
- Infocom eventually sold to Activision in 1986. The acquisition was reportedly motivated partly by Activision wanting Infocom's database compression technology.
