from the inspiration-for-the-Muppet's-Swedish-Chef? dept.
https://if50.substack.com/p/1977-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-10Opening Text:
You are in an open field west of a big white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
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."
Jargon File entry on Zork.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @04:15AM (6 children)
s/t.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @04:50AM (5 children)
Then why are you playing "SN Trolls Adventures"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @06:15AM
Hit A/C.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @06:19AM (2 children)
It has surprisingly good AI and replayability.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday February 19 2021, @11:39AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:27PM
The ideas expressed by the named accounts seem more repetitive than the AC ones, except for the few crap posters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:20PM
Because he knows all the action words to trigger Soylentil responses. The dictionary is well-known in Soylent News, unlike many of those blasted text adventure games.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @04:18AM (3 children)
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday February 19 2021, @02:53PM
MC Frontalot said it best [youtube.com]
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @07:02PM
You are alone in your mother's basement. You are obese. In your hand you see a family size bag of Cheetos.
(a) Kill yourself
(b) Kill yourself
(c) Kill yourself
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 20 2021, @10:08PM
I would rather be in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hubie on Friday February 19 2021, @04:18AM (9 children)
I was on a VAX in 1984. There were a number of fun games from that time that I played, like one of the treks (xtrek or netrek or trek83 or whatever) and a rogue-like game (moria?), and there was one of these adventure games. But damn if I can't remember which was which any more, but they were all a hell of a lot of fun, especially when you were procrastinating from writing a paper. The trek one really blew my mind because it was online multiplayer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday February 19 2021, @02:14PM (6 children)
I recall one text adventure, not sure which, where you had to cross a delicate bridge carrying three orbs. You could cross with two, but it would break if you had three. After being stumped for a very long time I learned from someone else that the answer was to juggle. That pissed me off to no end, because even at that age I understood physics well enough to know that wouldn't help. That turned me off of text adventure games, since the whole task is to figure out what the programmer was thinking.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday February 19 2021, @03:48PM (5 children)
Actually it *might* work in reality. Depends on the exact material properties of the bridge - juggling three balls still increases your average weight by 3 balls, but most of the time your weight will only be increased by two balls or less, with brief bursts that increase your weight by considerably-more-than-three balls while throwing or catching. Many materials are elastic enough to hold a larger load for sufficiently brief periods, but will fail under a lower sustained load once the elasticity reaches its limit.
Still a cheap trick though, and one of the reason I rarely play adventure games - text or otherwise. Far too many have "clever" bits like that, that don't really make sense outside the developer's deranged mind. If I have to refer to a cheat guide to solve a puzzle game... what exactly is the point?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @04:39PM (3 children)
Sorry, not even in theory would your explanation work out for the juggling.
Dynamic loading of the bridge due to throwing and catching will exceed the static loading of the bridge if you slowly walked across it carrying all three orbs. Whoever programmed the story simply didn't know basic physics.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday February 19 2021, @05:25PM (2 children)
>Dynamic loading of the bridge due to throwing and catching will exceed the static loading of the bridge if you slowly walked across it carrying all three orbs.
Yes it will, during the throwing and catching impulses, but NOT for the majority of the time when one or more balls are in the air. And things don't break instantly unless they're perfectly rigid (aka nonexistent, though glass and ceramic get pretty close over human-perceivable timescales - which is probably why they don't build bridges out of them)
Consider - you catch and throw a ball, temporarily increasing your mass to self +3.5 balls or maybe +7 balls, whatever, depends on how hard you're throwing.
That only lasts for a second though, during which the bridge is stretching downward towards its breaking point... and then the load is removed, and the bridge contracts, propelling you upwards. Then the cycle repeats. If you're juggling at the bridge's resonant frequency you're going to have problems, but at an erratic frequency, or one that causes destructive interference (e.g. often catching the ball while you're moving upwards, giving the bridge more time to recover) I'm pretty sure you could make make it work. Especially if the bridge is capable of supporting the weight of you +2.9 orbs so that the gentle, static load only barely exceeds its strength.
The physics of flexible objects is FAR more complicated than the rigid-body simplifications typically used in physics and engineering classes. Which is one of the reasons acceptable safety margins are so wide - trying to analyze the loading details within a real-world flexible system is a nightmare that only even became possible to reasonably approximate with the advent of high-power supercomputers performing finite element analysis - and even that introduces a lot of inaccuracies due to oversimplification of real-world mechanical imperfections.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @07:06PM (1 child)
The impulses of catching and throwing are not that fast. If a bridge is so fragile that it can't handle the weight of a person plus 3 orbs without breaking, there is no way it will withstand the dynamic load forces of a juggling body plus the throwing and catching actions. Those body actions are relatively SLOW, and bear in mind the bridge is already near collapse. I don't know why you are going to such lengths to defend a story contrivance based on an author who clearly never even understood the concept of dynamic loading; he thought one orb in the air at all times means total, max force on the bridge equals body weight plus two orbs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @10:27PM
Maybe he just didn't know how to juggle? Maybe he was a good enough juggler that he had 0 balls in his hands? Maybe the bridge was short enough that no throwing was required mid-bridge?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @05:23PM
What's the easiest way to break a wooden plank, for example? Stand still on it, or jump up and down on it?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday February 19 2021, @04:19PM (1 child)
I was on a VAX in 1984, too. The rogue-like game was actually rogue itself!
At some point I discovered Rog-O-Matic [wikipedia.org], which could play rogue a lot better than I could, and I spent many hours watching it play.
Then I discovered hack and, later, nethack...
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday February 19 2021, @06:11PM
Poking around this morning I think I saw mentioned that Dungeon was a FORTRAN port of Zork, so it could have been that too. Between 84 and 98 (weighted more towards the earlier time than later) I played a number of fun games on the VAX and all the like-minded ones have all just blurred together. As the Stones said, "What a drag it is getting old." :)
I also recall from the late 80s, I was in a physics department where they had purchased two very impressive Sun workstations with nice very big displays. It came with (or someone put on) a 1-on-1 dogfight program that was played over the network. It had very impressive graphics for the time and it was real-time flying around in F-16s (or whatever they were) trying to shoot each other down. They had to ban that game because when they were playing it, it brought the internal network down to a crawl. :)
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Friday February 19 2021, @06:25AM (1 child)
Zork II Wizard of Frobozz was the best one.
You would not believe how many time I assaulted that gazebo.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 19 2021, @02:51PM
All 3 definitely had their charms though: Zork I did a good job of introducing the Dimwit Flathead dynasty. I found the third game to be almost strangely haunting.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by C0L0PH0N on Friday February 19 2021, @06:40AM
I tried my hand at Zork a few times. Actually spent quite a few hours with it :). The game claimed a play time of 35 hours to learn, and I believe it. But I personally witnessed a young man whip through the entire game in literally 5 minutes. I went on to become a computer professional, but Zork gave me a saying I used for years. Of a tough computer program or programming problem, etc, I would say, "Well it takes about 35 hours to learn how, but once you know it, you can do it in 5 minutes ;). Thank you, Zork, for one of life's more important lessons ;).
(Score: 5, Funny) by bradley13 on Friday February 19 2021, @07:35AM
TextAdventures.co.uk - that's cool. It is just slightly irritating that a text site doesn't work properly without JavaScript.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by MrBoogers on Friday February 19 2021, @09:58AM (4 children)
And it was written in LISP and the source code is available online.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:24PM (1 child)
In the fine LISP tradition, it is a non-standard variant of LISP.
"No two exactly alike." The Zork LISP variant uses angle brackets instead of parentheses. Why? Why not, apparently...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:48PM
allow me to introduce you to forth...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @09:41PM (1 child)
No, it wasn't. It was written in MUDL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 20 2021, @08:01PM
Which is a variant of LISP.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 19 2021, @12:17PM
I enjoyed Zork at the time, and most of the other early games. Now, watching my son spend hours on an Oculus playing its games I marvel at how far we've come.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday February 19 2021, @01:39PM (2 children)
I played it when my English was still rudimentary. It was difficult but fun for me. Then I got a dream. I wanted a book where I could control the story. It would present readers with constant choices like real life does and the story would shift accordingly. Obviously, it can't be written by a human - just too long for any nontrivial one - so I am still waiting for computers to do it.
The next step would be a movie. Again, only a deep fake AI could generate even how the actors look after a viewer makes a decision on their fates.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday February 19 2021, @02:38PM (1 child)
Some games take a reasonable stab at this. I played Witcher 3 not too long ago and the whole game evolves depending upon some of the choices you make as you are playing, which is all the more impressive as it is an open world with nonlinear gameplay. It even goes as far as asking you in the beginning various questions about what happened in Witcher 2 so that your current game would be consistent, so if a certain NPC was killed in Witcher 2, they wouldn't appear in Witcher 3. Something like that is an impressive undertaking, and it makes me appreciate the effort that goes into making a game like that, needing scripts for many different scenarios, voice acting them, etc. I guess it is little wonder that these games are now many gigabytes in size.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 19 2021, @03:56PM
'eh, the complexity you're talking about shouldn't affect the size of the game in any appreciable way. The reason games are getting on near 60GB+ is 4k resolution on the grass! What irks me the most is when a game requires you to re-download the whole thing, because of an update. Now, if that game is a few megabytes or even a couple hundred megabytes, 'eh, whatever. But, when that game is a 30gb+ game, that becomes very annoying. Some of us don't have Fiber to the Home.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2021, @03:49PM (2 children)
There's a reason text adventures died out.
They were very brittle puzzles. This ranks high on the frustration scale. A lot of trying everything you could was involved which isn't really an exercise of your brain. You had to perform a magic set of actions in a particular order to solve the sometimes nonsensical puzzle. Your progress was completely blocked at times until you "discovered" or else had someone tell you the magic action you should have done to advance. The story telling got old quick your 20th time through the same room. The games don't have any repeat playability.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 19 2021, @06:15PM
I did play Adventure in about 1980 in college.
After college, my office got an InfoCom game: Suspended. On an Apple II. It was amazingly addictive.
Reading your comment reminds me of how Suspended, unlike Adventure, did not require any magical spells, or guessing games. Once you had managed to visit enough of the environment, you could logically deduce how to solve the grand problem. You would usually have to play multiple times in order to achieve this. And it took a long time. That was the challenge. Once you solved it, then it does lose interest like many other grand puzzles.
About a decade ago, I got addicted to a puzzle game that goes by several different names, but is the same puzzle problem: "unblock me", or "traffic jam". So I wrote a program (java, command line no gui) to solve these. At that point it was a solved problem and suddenly didn't seem so interesting.
I remember similar thinking with Sudoku.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday February 19 2021, @07:19PM
Not quite dead yet [iftechfoundation.org]. There are enough new ones coming out that they're still pretty fun, and the annual competition features games that should be winnable in a couple hours.
(Score: 1) by jman on Saturday February 20 2021, @12:25PM
At the time, the station where I was posted (we didn't have an active flight line, so weren't a "base") was where all software for the Air Force was written. I was an operator on the graveyard shift, and after spending a couple hours loading cards into the various mainframes on the floor, we didn't have a lot to do for awhile. Coffee and playing spades only went so far.
The two Univac 1050's on the floor, upon which the inventory system for USAF was written, only had 4K of memory! You couldn't even compile the whole program at once. Do a bit, dump to tape, rinse, repeat, eventually link all the bits together.
The PDP sat near the tape library (some 25,000 reels at 1600 BPI., a whole room containing a whopping terabyte of storage that can now fit on a single nVME stick), but its terminal was downstairs in the global support center.
Didn't ever finish the game, though. Still don't like making maps, and having to remember the IP address to log in and start playing was a pain.