Although I love IF, I'd never heard of Scott Adams and his games until now - so thank you! I noticed while reading this that at some point he began targeting a portable game engine, and went hunting for details. Eventually I found some documentation for the game file format (
https://github.com/MikeTaylor/scottkit/blob/master/docs/note...), and oh my it's short and sweet. Not as capable as the Z-machine but at 1 page vs (checking) 64 for a practical but still-compact specification (
https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/sp...), it's an impressively simple game engine.