History of Zork

Zork

a.k.a Dungeon
by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling
First Appeared: late June 1977
First Commercial Release: December 1980
Language: MDL
Platform: PDP-10

Opening Text: You are in an open field west of a big white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

[Note: contains spoilery discussion of the jeweled egg, cyclops, and robot puzzles.]

If Adventure had introduced hackers to an intriguing new genre of immersive text game, Zork was what brought it to the public at large. In the early 1980s, as the personal computer revolution reached into more and more homes, a Zork disk was a must-buy for first-time computer owners. By 1982 it had become the industry’s bestselling game. In 1983, it sold even more copies. Playboy covered it; so did Time, and American astronaut Sally Ride was reportedly obsessed with it. In 1984 it was still topping sales charts, beating out much newer games including its own sequels. At the end of 1985 it was still outselling any other game for the Apple II, half a decade after its first release on the platform, and had become the bestselling title of all time on many other systems besides.

Its creation can be traced to a heady Friday in May 1977 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the last day of finals week, and summer was kicking off with a bang for the school’s cohort of tech-obsessed engineers: a new movie called Star Wars opened that day in theaters, the groundbreaking Apple II had just been released, and Adventure was exploding across the terminals of computer labs nationwide, thousands of students having no further distractions, at last, to keep them from solving it.

Among those obsessive players were four friends at a campus research lab, the Dynamic Modeling Group. Within two weeks they’d solved Adventure, squeezing every last point from it through meticulous play and, eventually, the surgical deployment of a machine-language debugger. Once the game was definitively solved, they immediately hatched plans to make something better. Not just to prove the superiority of their school’s coding prowess over Don Woods at Stanford—though that was undoubtedly part of it—nor simply because many were dragging their feet on graduating or finding jobs, and a challenging new distraction seemed immensely appealing—though that was part of it too. But the most important factor was that Adventure had been so incredibly fun and, regrettably, there wasn’t any more of it. “It was like reading a Sherlock Holmes story,” one player recalled, “and you wanted to read another one of them immediately. Only there wasn’t one, because nobody had written it.”

The four friends were an eclectic group of grad students ranging in age from 22 to 28, united by shared sensibilities and a love of hacking. Dave Lebling had a political science degree and had started programming only because of an accidental hole in his freshman year schedule. A “voracious reader” and “frustrated writer,” he’d helped design Maze in 1973, one of the earliest graphical exploration games and first-person shooters. Marc Blank was young, tall, thin, and technically enrolled in med school, but found messing around with computers an addictive distraction. Bruce Daniels was nearing thirty and increasingly bored with his PhD topic; he’d helped develop the lab’s pet project, the MDL programming language, and was always eager to find new ways of showing it off. And Tim Anderson was close to finishing his master’s but none too excited about leaving the heady intellectual community at MIT. With Adventure solved, the four sat down to hack together a prototype for an improved version, which would run like the earlier game on a PDP-10 mainframe. Needing a placeholder name for the source file, they typed in zork, one of many nonsense words floating around campus that could, among other usages, be substituted for an offensive interjection.

The game they began to create was at first quite similar to Adventure, so much so that historian Jimmy Maher has noted parts of it are more remake than homage. Both games begin in a forest outside a house containing supplies for an underground expedition, including food, water, and a light source with limited power; in both you search for treasures in a vast underground cave system and score points by returning them to the building on the surface; both feature underground volcanoes, locked grates, trolls, and a “maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” Hacker tropes and nods to other early text games abound, like a huge bat who whisks you off to another location like in Hunt the Wumpus. But as Zork expanded, it began to develop its own character: less realistic than the caverns sketched from Will Crowther’s real-life experience, but also more whimsical, more threatening, and driven by an improved parser and world model.

>open trap door
The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase descending into darkness.
>down
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.
>what is a grue?
The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

The infamous grues were invented as a solution to a sort of bug: not with the game’s code, but with the player’s suspension of disbelief. In early versions of Zork, as in Adventure, you’d fall into a bottomless pit if you tried to move through a dark room without a portable light source. But someone noticed this could happen in Zork even in the dark attic of the above-ground house. Lebling, stealing the word “grue” from a Jack Vance novel, invented a new and more broadly applicable threat for dark places.

by Aaron A. Reed, Substack | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. A great classic. From the series 50 Years of Text Games.]