Zork

Extracted Attributes

• Genre

  Interactive fiction / Text adventure

• Developers

  Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling

• Original Platform

  PDP-10 mainframe computer

• Commercial Publisher

  Infocom

• Development Institution

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• First Commercial Release Date

  1980

Timeline

• Initial development of Zork begins at MIT on the PDP-10 mainframe computer. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1977-06-01

• The developers of Zork found Infocom to commercialize the game and other software. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1979-06-22

• Zork I: The Great Underground Empire is commercially released for personal computers by Personal Software. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1980-12-01

• Infocom buys back the rights to Zork and begins self-publishing the trilogy. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1981-10-01

• Activision acquires Infocom, taking ownership of the Zork franchise. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1986-06-13

• Zork is inducted into the Library of Congress game canon as one of the ten most important video games in history. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2007-03-12

Zork

Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction. The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), the first well-known example of interactive fiction and the first well-known adventure game. The developers wanted to make a similar game that was able to understand more complicated sentences than Adventure's two-word commands. In 1979, they founded Infocom with several other colleagues at the MIT computer center. Blank and Joel Berez created a way to run a smaller portion of Zork on several brands of microcomputer, letting them commercialize the game as Infocom's first products. The first episode was published by Personal Software in 1980, after which Infocom purchased back the rights and self-published all three episodes beginning in late 1981. Zork was a massive success for Infocom, with sales increasing for years as the market for personal computers expanded. The first episode sold more than 38,000 copies in 1982, and around 150,000 copies in 1984. Collectively, the three episodes sold more than 680,000 copies through 1986, comprising more than one-third of Infocom's sales in this period. Infocom was purchased by Activision in 1986, leading to new Zork games beginning in 1987, as well as a series of books. Reviews of the episodes were very positive, with several reviewers calling Zork the best adventure game to date. Critics regard it as one of the greatest video games. Later historians have noted the game as foundational to the adventure game genre, as well as influencing the MUD and massively multiplayer online role-playing game genres. In 2007, Zork was included in the game canon by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most important video games in history.

Web Search Results

• Zork - Wikipedia

  Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson "Tim Anderson (programmer)"), Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the [...] Zork was the centerpiece of Infocom's game catalog, and Infocom quickly followed it with several more text adventure games using variants of the Zork codebase and the Z-machine, each of which sold tens of thousands of copies. By 1984, three years after Infocom began self-publishing Zork I, Infocom had fifty full-time employees, US$6 million in annual sales, and twelve other games released. Infocom internally nicknamed its early games in relation to Zork, such as "Zork: the Mystery" (Deadline, 1982), "Zorks in Space" (Starcross, 1982), and Zork IV (Enchanter "Enchanter (video game)"), 1983). By 1986 this had increased to 26 total titles. Although Wishbringer: The Magick Stone of Dreams (1985) was ostensibly set in the same world as Zork, the company had not made any more official Zork [...] Zork was a massive success for Infocom, with sales increasing for years as the market for personal computers expanded. The first episode sold more than 38,000 copies in 1982, and around 150,000 copies in 1984. Collectively, the three episodes sold more than 680,000 copies through 1986, comprising more than one-third of Infocom's sales in this period. Infocom was purchased by Activision in 1986, leading to new Zork games beginning in 1987, as well as a series of books. Reviews of the episodes were very positive, with several reviewers calling Zork the best adventure game to date. Critics regard it as one of the greatest video games. Later historians have noted the game as foundational to the adventure game genre, as well as influencing the MUD and massively multiplayer online role-playing

• Zork I - The Great Underground Empire : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

  Zork: The Great Underground Empire is a classic text adventure game. The player begins as an "adventurer" standing near a white house in a nice forest, but soon descends into the Great Underground Empire, where most of the game takes place. The player's quest is to collect the Nineteen Treasures of Zork. As was typical for adventure games of its era, Zork does not use graphics. Instead, it communicates with the player via text, and the player interacts with the game by typing commands, such as "examine mailbox" or "take torch". For movement, the player types in geographical directions (such as "north" or "east" - or just "n" and "e"), and can check what items are being carried with the "inventory" command (or just "i").

• A Brief History of ‘Zork’

  # A Brief History of ‘Zork’ You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. ByRob Lammle| Google DiscoverAdd us as a preferred source Let's Play - Zork I: The Great Underground Empire | GameHorder Zork is a text-based video game, a genre also known as “interactive fiction,” whose defining feature is the absence of typical video game graphics. Instead, the game’s environments and the actions you take are described for you. For example, the first line of Zork is, “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” [...] ## How old is Zork? Zork was written between 1977 and 1979 by MIT students Tim Anderson, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling, and Marc Blank. The young geeks got the idea for Zork from the first text-based video game, Adventure (also called Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT, because the computer it ran on could only use so many letters in the command line). Adventure was created in 1976 by Will Crowther, a student at Stanford, as a simulation of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, with a few Tolkien-esque fantasy elements thrown in by fellow Stanfordite Don Woods. The MIT guys weren’t impressed with Adventure’s limited two-word command structure (“kill troll”), so they wrote Zork to understand complete sentences (“kill troll with sword”). [...] Just as home computers were becoming more commonplace, a commercial version of Zork was released by Infocom, a company founded by Anderson, Lebling and Blank. However, they didn’t initially intend to sell Zork. They set out to create serious productivity software for the home and business market, but when they realized they didn’t actually have any of those programs written yet, they decided Zork sales could fund their future endeavors.

• ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire

  ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved. ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc. Revision 88 / Serial number 840726 if !supportEmptyParas? endif? West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. if !supportEmptyParas? endif? >open mailbox Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet. if !supportEmptyParas? endif? >read leaflet (Taken) "WELCOME TO ZORK! if !supportEmptyParas? endif? ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!" if !supportEmptyParas? endif? >drop leaflet Dropped.

• Zork - Ready Player One Video Game Replay - Nuketown

  Skip to content Nuketown The left half of the picture shows a wireframe style map. The right-hand side features a text interface for Zork I # Zork – Ready Player One Video Game Replay by Ken Newquist Developed at MIT between 1977 and 1979, Zork is the quintessential interactive fiction adventure game. Descended from the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure (the game I’m actually much more familiar with), it started players at a simple White House in the woods and invited them to explore an expansive underground empire. I played the M.I.T. release for this review. A later, more polished version was published by Infocom as the Zork Trilogy in 1980. ## Quote [...] ## Quote > It was a high-resolution scan of the instruction manual cover for the text adventure game Zork – the version released in 1980 by Personal Software for the TRS-80 Model III. > > I’d played and solved Zork once, a long time ago, back during the first year of the Hunt. But I’d also played hundreds of other classic text adventure games that year, including all of Zork’s sequels, and so most of the details of the game had now faded in my memory. ## Game Play Zork is classic text adventure game, and defined the genre for a generation. It’s a text only game in which you enter commands like “west” or “climb ladder” or “get sword.” The parser is adequate, but not advanced; it understands simple instructions (or at least the instructions it expects).

• Instance Of

  Q4167410