Zork and Imagination
Back when we occasionally had to use our brains to create the images within games, a.k.a. in the 1980s and earlier, a text-based adventure game called Zork was incredibly popular. Since most games back then were either played on a board or in the backyard, our imaginations regularly got a workout. Besides, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other books (stories written on piles of flat sheets called “paper” and bound together) were popular back then too, so the imagery came easily.
If you were born after 1980, brace yourself; the screenshot you see below may shock you.
That’s right. You type in text commands and the game responds in text. Guaranteed to work on all ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards without updating drivers or setting anti-aliasing settings. It will still run today, 27 years later. Heck, it’ll probably run on your cell-phone. (That reminds me… you can play a voice-based Zork over the phone if you’re so inclined. Via MAKE and DownloadSquad.)
Zork History
In the late 1970s, several guys from MIT’s Dynamic Modeling Group developed an adventure game called Dungeon, written in MDL, and that ran on DEC’s PDP-10. Some of the DM Group programmers founded Infocom in 1979 and released a commercial version of Zork for microcomputers such as the Apple II and TRS-80, though they had to split it into Zork I, II, and III to get it to run on the less-capable home computers.
Hand Drawn Dungeon Map
Many players would sketch out maps to help them keep track of their surroundings. This was part of the fun.
Several blogs have recently linked to a map, shown below, at Tom Almy’s website. The map is self-attributed to Steven Roy, and some searching reveals that it was scanned from November 1982 issue of The DEC Professional. Almy’s Dungeon page has downloads for playing Dungeon on DOS and Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.
More Infocom Info
The Infocom archive at University of Western Onterio has a wealth of Infocom lore, articles, FAQs, games, and scans of various maps from other Infocom games as well.
Tags: Free · Game design · History · Linux · Macintosh · Mainframe · PC · Platforms · Text
4 responses so far ↓
1 colintheriot // Apr 27, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Man, that map is FANTASTIC! My intro to Zork was back in the day (but not all the way) when I got a hold of the Lost Treasures of Infocom Collection, which had big old floppy disks (back when they were still floppy). No schmancy graphics have ever been able to capture the sense of wonder and exploration I got from Zork though. I even recall drawing my own maps, though they were far from the quality of this one.
I’m such a fan I even had a t-shirt design based on Zork (and old games in general) on my own blog DailyShirts.com.
If you’re interested, please check it out! Again, great post.
2 montyl // May 6, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Oh my… talk about a flashback; I was transported back to Fall 1979, Dam Neck, Virginia, to the staff office in the Naval Training Center. Hanging on the wall near the dumb terminal (the PDP-10 safely housed in its own controlled environment) was a sheet of newsprint that appeared shockingly similar to the map above.
I still have my copy of it… somewhere…
xyzzy…
3 Howard Sherman // May 24, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Guess what? Zork turns 30 next month!
http://www.malinche.net/zork.html
4 Jim // Feb 3, 2011 at 3:45 pm
That’s some nostalgia! I received and still own my copy of the map from Steve when I was consulting at the company he worked for around 1984-1985.
There’s more to that story, but I won’t go in to it here. Interesting guy, interesting times.
Thanks!
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