Going Behind Zork

The first PC game I remember playing was Top Gun based on the movie starring Tom Cruise. It was a pretty basic affair, just a green line on a screen with numbers off to the side for missiles and such. Every once in a while a cranky warning would sound and a wire frame jet fighter would appear and then be gone into the digital blank yonder.

The first PC game I really got into was Zork. Really it was an Infocom variety pack of twenty or so games my dad bought. Probably thought… I have no idea what he thought they were other than a way for his son to get off the Nintendo and out of books. Little did he know I would spend hours reading text from a screen while immersed in the Great Underground Empire.

Zork started in 1977 from four MIT programmers who wanted to run a text adventure game with natural language. That means instead of two word commands like "examine table," you could also "flip the table over" and the computer narrator of the world would respond "flip the table over what?"

It was limited at the time, a very literal version of the AI so many of us talk to today. At the same time, however, the team also made the narrator a little snarky and opinionated to be less like a computer. It was not the first interactive fiction, but it started something.

Because MIT was connected to the ARPANET and the new adventure program (titled "zork" because that's what MIT programmers called their projects in development) was on their computers, users soon found it and began sending it around. The whole program was written with no plan, just what the programmers thought would be cool and what their user base said worked.

The most famous monster, the grue that eats players in the dark, came from one of these playtest sections. It was originally a pit the player could fall into. Then, a player fell into a pit in the attic and if you don't see the problem there, well, find a dictionary.

When 1980 came around and they decided to sell, they named it "Dungeon." Then the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons said "hey, now…" and it was renamed "Zork: Don't Sue Us Edition." The fact that it shared exploration and monster fighting helped. Then, because one megabyte is a lot of information for computers, it was split into three games released in 1980, 1981, and 1982, eventually selling 680,000 units by 1986.

That's a lot in 1986 units. We checked.

Activision bought the company in 1987. They pumped out some more games and books and generally ran it into the ground like most games companies do.

The legacy lives on, as they say. In 2007 the Library of Congress named Zork one of the ten most important games of all time. Games with exploration of big worlds, collecting materials, puzzle solving owe a lot to this little text giant.

As for the little game based on a movie called Top Gun? No one ever heard of it again.

ST Harker

December 19, 2022

Seattle, WA