Zork

Recently I’ve been reminiscing about some of the early video games I played, including Adventure. Adventure was a video game adaptation of the classic text-based computer game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just called Adventure), which was followed by the immensely popular computer text adventure game Zork. Zork was written by four MIT programmers on DEC PDP-10 and was originally called Dungeon. The term Zork was a MIT hacker word for an unfinished program, which fit perfectly, since you were always in the process of completing the game by making decisions based on text input. get sword… swing sword… kill troll with sword…

Once the personal computer explosion was under way, computer game company INFOCOM released Zork I, II & III for the PC. It was around that time that my friend Rick C. turned me onto Zork and from then on I was hooked.

If you want to check out Zork, you can play the online version. To this day, I’m still quite concerned that I will most likely be eaten by a grue.