The Enduring Legacy of Zork | Hacker News Reader

The Enduring Legacy of Zork

technologyreview.com

145 pointstellarin48 comments

If you like this, you might also like the excellent “Eaten by a Grue” podcast (http://monsterfeet.com/grue/) where Kevin Savetz and Carrington Vanston are playing through and discussing all Infocom games.

If you want to know even more -- much, much, much more -- about these and other 8-bit computer games, I can recommend all of the Digital Antiquarian blog (mentioned by sohkamyung), which has been collected into ten ebooks. They really are fantastic.

My obsession with Zork and other Infocom games introduced me to computing concepts such as virtual machines, platform-independent intermediate language, variable length text encoding, and natural language processing.

I recall finding old Byte magazines in the university library that revealed the internals of Infocom's games. I felt like I had uncovered hidden gold.

I even think the first time I encountered the word "database" was in an explanation of how you could code a simple text adventure game.

Do you know from which year they were?

An adventure game issue in 1980. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12

He might have been thinking of this issue: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12

There's an article by David Liebling who worked for Infocom. There's also an article by Scott Adams in the issue.

On page 7 is an add for Shugart! Later renamed to Seagate!

The ads in there are great. That issue actually predates the IBM PC by a year (and my own exposure to microcomputers to any great degree by about the same length of time). So this is serious blast from the past before things standardized in any but very broad-brush ways.

If you're interested in Zork and functional programming, you might be interested in Eric Lippert's series about writing a Z-machine (a virtual machine used by Infocom for some of it's text adventure games, including Zork) in OCaml.

https://ericlippert.com/category/zmachine/

Also see "Lists and Lists"[1], which is a Scheme tutorial in a z-machine, written by Andrew Plotkin.[2]

[1] - http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=zj3ie12ewi1mrj1t

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin

I really love Zork. If anyone misses these games, there are many excellent and free modern titles in the IF (interactive fiction) community. I like Emily Short's games. Andrew Plotkin is another popular name. With the inform7 platform it is much easier for a single person to write a compelling game than in the Infocom days.

Totally agree. Modern IF is amazing. Check out the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for good games: https://ifcomp.org/.

Also, Inform is a fascinating "English language" programming experience! For example here's an actual Inform program:

` "Prototype" by Josh

The Lookout Point is a room. An old man is here.

The Outskirts is south from the Lookout Point. A campaign poster is here.

The Village is east from the Outskirts.

The Scumm Bar is inside from The Village. `

I loved text adventures as a kid. I thought it was some kind of magic. I had no idea how a computer could figure out what I had just typed and answer me in a way that made sense.

But I can't think of a single one I ever completed besides Scott Adams' "Adventureland". Almost all these games seemed to eventually get to a "maze" portion, and that's where I'd just give up.

Some games had puzzles that seemed literally impossible to solve, and would allow many opportunities for game-breaking actions (with no indication you had done so).

Later on, I really loved Sierra adventure games. But really, they suffered from all the same ridiculous puzzles and game-breaking crap. I couldn't finish most of them without the clue books.

Obligatory links to a great documentary on text adventures and infocom:

http://www.getlamp.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp

Jimmy Maher has a fascinating series of article on the entire Zork series.

This tag link [1] should give you all the articles, but in reverse chronological order, so start at the bottom and work your way backwards to newer posts.

[1] http://www.filfre.net/tag/zork/page/4/

“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”

Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I wasn't even a Russian Spy! [1]

Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game itself.

At the time there were no passwords or anything but security through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours "TURIST Accounts" [2] to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words.

Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce's NorthStar Horizon in Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step:

1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 [3] at 300 baud, typed "E" to get the banner, then "@L 134" to connect to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP/IP's vast 32 bit address space!)

2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH).

3) Try to log in with that name, like ":LOGIN A2DEH".

4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account. In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS's password was famously "RMS", after they forced everyone to use a password over his objections).

5) If it doesn't recognize your user name, it asks "Do you want to apply for an account?" Answer YES. When it asks "Why do you want to use the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10?" answer "Learning LISP." (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.)

6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and YP), and although you still can't log into DM directly, you could log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS).

7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless questions like "how to you set the value of a variable?").

8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with "@L 70".

9) Log in as "URANUS" with password "RINGS".

10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the country [4] logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user name to your own with ":CHUNAME A2DEH".

11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially acceptable manner) on whoever's playing ZORK via ":OS PDL" (for "Output Spy Paul David Lebling"), or snooping around trying to find the Zork source code [5], which was well hidden.

12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin Minsky's home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal Turing Machine he implemented in TECO. [6]

13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a "nice private message" telling your they know what you're up to with ZORK, and that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because it's such a great language, instead of demanding you commit "seppuku" and "dumping you off the net and be done with it", you simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled dick [7] by whining about how the people who gave you a free account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start inquiring into its operations by seeing if your "Pentagon friends can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0

[2] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html

[3] https://www.saildart.org/TIPS[P,DOC]3

[4] https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths

[5] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918

[7] http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html

I was really hoping [1] was a clip from The Americans. Great show. Of course, it has Commodore 64s all over the place so of course I'm going to say that.

The travel agency office had a Commodore PET, but at least it had the full sized "adult" keyboards instead of the chiclet keyboards (only suitable for Trump sized hands).

http://www.commodore.ca/gallery/misc/pet-2001.jpg

I love the scene where Claudia is playing PAC-MAN, philosophizing about how she loves the chase through the maze, and how it relates to life (as a KGB spy).

Thanks so much for the detailed write up. I entirely missed these days and they're fascinating to read about in this level of depth.

Oh, you are A2DEH. "Hi" from 1979 or 1980, from ZEMON. I saw you online a lot, playing Zork on MIT-AI, and I probably :os'd a few of your sessions.

I too was using the NBS TIP. Later, I actually worked at NBS and became "legal". I first learned Emacs at 300 baud; I'll spare you the whole story, but it involves a lot of assembly language and some soldering...

Of course I remember your cool UNAME standing out in all those :WHOJ's! ;)

Do you remember Rob Griffiths, aka ROBG? I really enjoyed his full interview from Get Lamp -- he really nailed what it was like at that time, making a pilgrimage to 545 Tech Square as a 15-year-old kid!

https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths

He and you are a couple of the people who I was thinking of when I described kids from all over the country hanging out chatting and spying and waiting to play Zork!

My best friend in high school went to MIT and I ... didn't (it's okay, the state college I wound up going to was about my academic speed, and I would have been toast in a couple of semesters at MIT).

I also did a pilgrimage to MIT and saw the DEC-10s. Printed out a school project on the LGP, played around with a Lisp Machine for a few hours.

MIT's friendly, unparanoid attitude towards people using their systems and basically just digging their technology was very formative in my career. Zork was the hook. I came to play adventure games, I stayed to learn Emacs and a bit about networking and PDP-10s, and LISP. I don't use PDP-10s anymore, but I work in the games industry, use Emacs every hour of my working day, and wish I could write more production LISP (though if you squint at Javascript just right...)

Interesting article. I had not realised that Zork Implementation Language (ZIL) was Lisp!

Zork was implemented in a dialect of LISP called "MDL" aka "MIT Design Language" aka "Muddle" [1], which ZIL was based on.

Here's the original MDL source code, that people should study in school, which reads like an epic poem about heroic adventures such as Beowulf! [2]

I'd love for some academic egghead literary critic type to deconstruct [3] the Zork MDL source code, like Chaim Gingold deconstructed SimCity for their PhD thesis. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)

[2] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl

[3] http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

[4] https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=ABS

http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DNAvqvKsuLGih8dWz9feEjea...

Loved Zork - right back in the 80's when my dad had and IBM PC/XT that I used to play it on. Spent a LOT of time trying to kill that dastartdly thief without much success.

More recently, I got a Z-Machine interpreter for my iPad and been playing a lot of the old Infocom titles. Now if I can only get an unscratched version of the 'scratch 'n' sniff' card that came with "Leather Godesses of Phobos"... :D

Heh. It turns out I actually have one. (Nope can't have it. Sorry :-)) Not sure why it's unscratched as I played the game. I may have had another copy at one point as a friend wrote Leather Goddesses (and its graphical sequel among other Infocom games).

> The MIT mainframe operating system (called ITS) let Zork’s creators remotely watch users type in real time, which revealed common mistakes. “If we found a lot of people using a word the game didn’t support, we would add it as a synonym,” says Daniels.

So aggressive user surveillance was used as far back as 1977. Some things never change!

Obligatory Infocom Cabinet link:

https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet

https://github.com/devshane/zork

For anyone who wants to read about Zork-games, I recommend the play-troughts from the CRPG-Addict: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/search?q=zork

Highly entertaining!

Obligatory ShowHN: http://ifiction.org/games/index.php?cat=2

An all time-classic game that got many of us hooked on gaming back in the day. It took me countless hours to figure out the carousel in Zork II, but when I eventually cracked it, it was tremendously satisfying. This is something people miss out on today in the age of google and games that are easily solved.

I remember observing - quite seriously - that "the whole game seems to revolve around the carousel room", and a friend busted out laughing. It took me almost a minute to catch on to what he was laughing about, and then I felt quite clever for having been so accidentally funny (I was... probably around 12 at this time).

Anyone have access to the Zork variant/predecessor "Dungeon"?

Wikipedia indicates that it was merely a name change for the same game, is there more to it?

I recently needed something "interesting" to run on a simple microcontroller (ESP8266) so I ported Zork to FreeRTOS. It ran fine. Connect via serial port...

The basis for the NBC show "Chuck" was solving a Zork based puzzle if I'm not mistaken. I think that was the first episode.

I wish they'd put it back on Netflix.

http://www.tvids.net/watch56/CHUCK/

This is also a fun project to build a virtual machine for. I've been working on one, but haven't finished it yet. Not too complex, but very educational.

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Is there still a way to gain financially from that legend? e.g. by licensing, or consulting because one of part of the team back then or something?

I ask because usually community-created legends are hosted and develop in forums/mailing list etc, but when people write professional articles about it, it's quite likely someone still invests financially in that story.

Not sure what you're saying. Technology Review is published by MIT where the game was originally developed. It also functions as MIT's alumni magazine and the topic is likely to be of interest to MIT alumni.

> Is there still a way to gain financially from that legend?

No. There is no money in classic (i.e, text-based) interactive fiction. There is a small community of amateur game developers, but it's almost all noncommercial. There is certainly no financial investment in the scene.

Sometimes legends are just history.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue..if that thought seems particularly cruel...consider whose fault it could be...not a match or a torch in your inventory.

-some nerdcore rapper (can't remember name)

That was MC Frontalot, I believe.

Correct!

Was it MC Chicken in the Hat?

Also the theme song for the excellent “Eaten by a Grue” podcast. http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

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