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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: 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?