Zork proved that a parser could understand full sentences and that text could carry humor, personality and a coherent world; it launched Infocom, the premier text-adventure studio, and through its Fortran port Dungeon it gave the first MUD its name.
Overview
"West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door." Behind that house lies the Great Underground Empire, a vast, abandoned realm built by the extravagant Lord Dimwit Flathead, where treasure waits among a dam, a coal mine, a volcano, a thief who picks your pockets, and in every unlit passage the grue. Zork, created at MIT in 1977 and sold by Infocom from 1980 as a trilogy, is the most famous piece of interactive fiction ever written and the adventure game that showed how much personality a text parser could have.
Origins
In the spring of 1977, Colossal Cave Adventure was a hit at MIT; by the end of May players had solved it completely. Four members of the Dynamic Modelling Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, students Tim Anderson, Marc Blank and Bruce Daniels and research staff member Dave Lebling, decided to write a better one, with richer sentences and fairer puzzles. They worked in MDL, a language suited to processing text, on a PDP-10. Lebling wrote the first parser; while he was on a two-week vacation the others built a prototype, and the file was called "zork," a nonsense word used around the lab for unfinished programs.
Because MIT's machines were open to anyone on the ARPANET, curious users found the game and spread it before it was finished, becoming an informal community of playtesters. The group added grues to replace the pits that killed players in the dark, borrowing the name from Jack Vance. Lebling noted that the combat system echoed Dungeons & Dragons, though he said his colleagues had never played it, and he thought of the parser as a kind of Dungeon Master narrating the story. In 1978 DEC employee Bob Supnik ported the game to Fortran, and the team, having renamed it Dungeon, released it under that title through the DEC users group. TSR claimed the name infringed on its trademark, and the authors went back to Zork. The final puzzle went in during February 1979.
How it plays
The player types commands, from "north" and "get lamp" to "put the lamp and sword in the case," and the program answers with sardonic, conversational prose. The 1977 version had 32 treasures and an endgame; for home computers it was split into three episodes. In Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, the goal is to find 19 treasures and deposit them in a trophy case in the white house. Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz adds a wandering, fading wizard whose spells all begin with F and a stronger plot. Zork III: The Dungeon Master introduces time pressure and ends with the player inheriting the mantle of the Dungeon Master himself. Puzzles can often be solved more than one way, and light is life: without a lamp, "it is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
Reception & impact
In 1979 Anderson, Blank, Lebling and others founded Infocom. Marc Blank and Joel Berez fitted the huge mainframe game onto microcomputers by designing the Zork Implementation Language and a portable virtual machine, the Z-machine, so one game file could run on many computers. Microsoft passed on publishing, so Personal Software released Zork I for the TRS-80 in December 1980, followed by an Apple II version. Infocom soon self-published and completed the trilogy by the fall of 1982.
Sales grew for years. Zork I sold 38,000 copies by the end of 1982 and around 150,000 in 1984; the three episodes together passed 680,000 copies through 1986, more than a third of Infocom's sales in that period. Byte declared that no advance in the science of Adventure had been "as bold and exciting." Infocom's hint booklets, printed in invisible ink as InvisiClues, became artifacts in themselves.
Legacy
Activision bought Infocom in 1986 and continued the series. In 2007 Zork was named to the Library of Congress's "game canon" of ten landmark video games. Critics from Matt Barton to Nick Montfort credit it less for any single feature than for modeling a coherent, dynamic world of objects that could act and be acted upon.
For roleplaying history, its most consequential descendant was accidental. At the University of Essex, Roy Trubshaw had played the Fortran Dungeon, and when he began a shared, multiplayer adventure in 1978 he called it Multi-User Dungeon: MUD, the ancestor of every online world that followed.
Marginalia
- 'zork' was lab slang for an unfinished program; the team used it as a placeholder name and it stuck.
- The grue, which eats players who wander in the dark, takes its name from the fiction of Jack Vance.
- Its Fortran port was released as Dungeon in 1978, until TSR objected that the title infringed on Dungeons & Dragons.
- Roy Trubshaw named MUD, the first multi-user dungeon, in tribute to that Dungeon version.
- Microsoft declined to publish Zork because it competed with Microsoft Adventure, though Bill Gates was a fan.
- Zork I alone accounted for about 20 percent of Infocom's annual sales in 1983, when the company had 15 titles.
Quick answers
- When was Zork first released?
- Zork was first released in 1977 (MIT mainframe); 1980–82 (Infocom trilogy).
- What kind of work is Zork?
- Zork is a text adventure in the Interactive Fiction & Text Adventures tradition, released for PDP-10, PDP-11, TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, CP/M and IBM PC.
- Why is Zork important?
- Zork proved that a parser could understand full sentences and that text could carry humor, personality and a coherent world; it launched Infocom, the premier text-adventure studio, and through its Fortran port Dungeon it gave the first MUD its name.
