A bit of context that's gone missing: In 1977, the Fortran source for Adventure, by Crowther and Woods, leaked from Stanford and starting making the rounds on PDP-10 magtapes. Zork, from MIT, came along shortly thereafter, and was seen as more than bit of MIT taking a slap at Stanford by saying, "Now, here's how to do this right. First, one creates a Dungeon Definition Language. ..."
This seems to be an earlier version than the one that included the One Lousy Point Donald Woods Stamp (a tribute to one of the authors of Adventure). Isn't there another version of the later Zork source code in MDL floating around, that has the Don Woods Stamp?
I worked with him at Sun on NeWS -- he's a great PostScript hacker! When you logged into his workstation, /etc/motd said "Welcome to Adventure. Would you like instructions?" -- but don't type "yes" to the Unix shell or you'll regret it. Here's his implementation of QuickSort in PostScript, and he also wrote the Spider card game for NeWS that shipped with OpenWindows (which is a nice clean well documented example of NeWS PostScript code), and he wrote a bunch of Open Look widgets and user interface plumbing for The NeWS Toolkit, too:
Here's a great interview with Don Woods from GET LAMP, in which he mentions playing Zork at MIT over the ARPANET. He describes the point at which he stopped playing Zork, when he had almost solved the entire game, but then they added a whole bunch of new stuff to the game that night. So he realized he would never completely solve it, and finally stopped playing.
I presume the "One Lousy Point" stamp is a cheeky tribute to Don Woods' ordeal playing Zork, because it's so damned hard to figure out how to find it (which I won't spoil):
It's a very early version. Zork development began arund June 1977, so this is just six month in.
I believe the officially final version is from 1981, and is the one Bob Supnik distributes. Macsyma developer Eric Swenson made off with a 1979 version, but it's virtually identical. I'm not aware of any more preserved versions beyond these three.
If you like text adventures with something easier than Zork, try Anchorhead. Then, Curses.
Yes, alike-passages are clunky and old-school cool,
but nowadays since Anchorhead the games are long
and good enough to be both enjoyed and
not get lost by design in several places (if any, just
several ones as a single or two puzzles, not as
a mechanic).
Curses can be unbearabily difficult, but
not on the "unwinnable by design"
as the others, at least not as
the old Infocom games.
Vicious Cycles is cool too albeit short.
And Slouch over Bedlam is damn poetry made
into a text adventure. Pure steampunk.
What's wonderful about this bug is that giving the troll to itself to eat gets rid of the troll, but doesn't clear the TROLL-FLAG. ;( So then when you try to exit the room to the NORTH, EAST or SOUTH, you get TCHOMPed, and the non-existent troll fends you off with a menacing gesture! ;) So you are truly fucked, and can't finish the game.
>EAST
The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.
#ROOM {"MTROL"
"You are in a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls."
"The Troll Room"
%<> #EXIT {"WEST" "CELLA"
"EAST" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "CRAW4" %,TCHOMP}
"NORTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "PASS1" %,TCHOMP}
"SOUTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "MAZE1" %,TCHOMP}}
(#FIND-OBJ {"TROLL"})}
<PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">
"You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
If this predicament seems particularly cruel,
consider whose fault it might be;
not a torch or a match in your inventory."
https://youtu.be/4nigRT2KmCE
Adventure text games like Zork to a huge extent increased my English language skills. In order to play adventure games as a kid which I loved doing I had to understand the text. When I encountered words I did not understand I looked them up in a dictionary doing learning while playing.
> <SET DUMMY? T>>>
<COND (<OR <AND <MEMQ <SET O <FIND-OBJ "CANDL">>
<AOBJS .WIN>>
<1? <OLIGHT? .O>>>
<AND <MEMQ <SET O <FIND-OBJ "TORCH">> <AOBJS .WIN>>
<1? <OLIGHT? .O>>>>
<UNWIND
<PROG ()
<COND (.DUMMY?
<TELL
"I didn't realize that adventurers are stupid enough to light a
" 1 <ODESC2 .O> " in a room which reeks of coal gas.
Fortunately, there is justice in the world.">)
(<TELL
"Oh dear. It appears that the smell coming from this room
was coal gas. I would have thought twice about carrying a
" 1 <ODESC2 .O> "in here.">)>
<FWEEP 7>
<JIGS-UP " BOOOOOOOOOOOM ">>
<JIGS-UP " BOOOOOOOOOOOM ">>)>)>>
So if you come into this room with a candle or a torch, you're a dummy and get told as much. And then the jigs up, BOOOOOOM
Is it possible to play Zork for the first time without a guide or manual of some kind? Could I fire up a copy today and dive straight in or do I need some external information?
Edit: and a follow-up question, is there a good Z-Machine interpreter for the macOS terminal?
The Zork this post is about shouldn't have any copy-protection schemes requiring external resources, as this is the version which was on MIT computers. The commercial release may have had copy-protection in place.
Regardless of which you play, there are likely to be frustrating, unfair, perhaps unsolvable puzzles present. Modern players often have the Infocom invisiclues at hand while they do so.
The modern-ish Zorks (i.e. the ones available for a range of home computers, Zork 1/2/3, not mainframe Zork) can be done almost entirely without clues (and have no external frob based copy-protection). I remember vividly finally having to seek help in Zork 3, as the phrase "Hello, sailor" was not part of the typical 12 year-old's lexicon, but that was the only time I completely tapped out.
There are some pretty nutty things buried in the game, though - there's a spot in Zork 1 where by typing "temple" or "treasure" at the appropriate location you can teleport from one to the other - the supposed hint for this is they both have a granite wall. WTF?
I believe at the time, as a teenager, I finished most of the Infocom games available without using clues - it can be done. I think I never got the optimum outcome for Deadline.
I recently (this year) finished Starcross without hints or clues, aside from the copy-protection "map" at the start.
> I finished most of the Infocom games available without using clues - it can be done.
IIRC, both Witness and Bureaucracy had physical stuff in the box that didn't look like copy protection, but without which it wasn't possible to finish the game - e.g. There was no way to figure out some things in Bureaucracy unless you read the included copy of "Popular Paranoia".
Yup. Starcross was similar; I meant clues rather than copy-protection under another name. I played store-bought versions of these game (on my old Commodore 64) and never bought "invisiclues" so the line between these categories was quite clear. I don't recall what the medium of my final "tap out" in Zork 3 was - but recall being stuck for months and finally looking up the "hello sailor" bit.
This might not have been such a problem if I had played the Zorks in order, but I bought Zork 3 before Zork 1 because that was what they had in the shop. Otherwise I might have seen the verse in Zork 1:
"Oh ye who go about saying unto each, "Hello sailor",
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?"
You can definitely dive into Zork fresh and have fun, and probably make it a fair ways into the game. But you will almost certainly hit a wall somewhere in the middle, as some of the puzzles (and also one important game mechanic) are pretty non-obvious, and the game doesn't signpost how to proceed.
Real releases of the game worked around this with "Invisiclues", which were sets of questions ("How do I get past the troll?") with increasingly specific hints that one is meant to uncover one by one. If you get the game files from a usual sort of place, the invisiclues will probably be included (possibly in the form of a z-machine game file).
Note that the preceding all applies to normal released versions of the game, the source in TFA could be older/different/etc.
For Z-machine on mac, I use one called "Zoom". But it's a windowed app, I don't know if it can run in the terminal or if there are alternatives.
Zork definitely has some puzzles that are practically impossible to figure out, without some help.
The ITS operating system that Zork was developed on was a extremely open, with very little security, but lots of obscurity.
ITS was like the original "social network," where users would hang out and socialize, with lots of visibility and awareness of each other and what they're doing, where everybody could see each other's files and read each other's email, with programs like "INQUIR" for telling other people about yourself, "WHOIS" and "FINGER" for finding out about other people, "WHOJ" to see who's on and what they're doing, "SEND" and "REPLY" for sending immediate messages back and forth, "UNTALK" for multi-window chatting, "MAIL" for sending email, "RMAIL" and "BABYL" for reading email, etc.
And (important to Zork) also "OS" (Output Spy) to spy on other people's sessions over their shoulders!
Only two people could play Zork at once on DM, and only after east coast business hours. Usually there were a few other people just hanging out, spying on the two lucky people playing, chit chatting with each other and the players by sending messages and email, etc.
It was considered perfectly normal and inoffensive behavior for people to spy on each other and learn about running Lisp, hacking Emacs, or playing Zork. (As long as you're not creepy or obnoxious about it, but people tended to be polite and follow the Tourist Policy, and people liked to help each other learn. And if you liked creepy obnoxious stuff, you could subscribe to REM-DIARY-READERS!)
>TOURIST POLICY AND RULES FOR TOURIST USE OF ITS MACHINES
>It has been a long standing tradition at both the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT to allow non-laboratory people to use the laboratories’ computers during off hours. During the early days of the laboratories’ existence a non-laboratory person (such people have come to be called tourists) could gain access to one of the computers by direct personal contact with a laboratory member. Furthermore, tourist access was controlled because access to the laboratories’ computers was de facto achieved through on site terminals. A tourist sponsored by a laboratory member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The expectation on the laboratories’ part was that a large percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A second expectation was that some percentage would become interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our research efforts. Tourists in this latter group would at some point in time graduate out of the tourist class and become laboratory members. In actual fact a number of former and present staff members and faculty earned their computational wings in just this fashion. [...]
MIT-DM was the Dynamic Modeling Lab's PDP-10 running a slightly different version of ITS, and it was the only ITS machine that had any form of file protection, which was primarily used to hide the Zork source code. But even that was essentially only security through obscurity, which was why the source was eventually leaked.
Zork had its own end-game, but getting an account on MIT-DM was like the pre-game, and logging into MIT-DM itself was like the Zork Lobby where you'd hang out waiting for your turn and socializing.
You could get an account on most of the ITS machines just by asking nicely and using the right magic words, like mentioning Lisp on MIT-AI, or Macsyma on MIT-MC, or SomewhatBasic on MIT-ML. But Zork was so sought after that DM was one of the harder ITS machines to get an account on -- you couldn't just say you wanted to play Zork or hack Lisp: you had to say you were interested in MDL for some plausible sounding mumbo jumbo like "algebraic applications". But they still knew you just wanted to play Zork, though.
PDP-10/its: Incompatible Timesharing System (github.com)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWo_-fvIzXU supnik talks about how he had to "liberate" zork from the ivory halls and pass it down to the people! Taking the code from mainframes down to minis. This guy is a true hero, like Moses from the Bible!
MDL looks really interesting. Is there any similar modern-day language for more advanced (graphically and input wise) adventure games? Because if not I might build one...
MDL was a language that was good for creating these mini DSLs in. Lisps today can do that too.
If you want a modern language that is purpose-built for creating games like this, there are a ton of visual novel engines. Those engines are optimized for trees/paths of dialogue and text, and for displaying media (images + audio) with the text.
renpy [0] is probably the most popular of those, but there's a long history of them if you do some digging with those keywords.
In the ‘90s (?), LucasArts and Sierra both developed VMs for graphical adventure games (SCUMM and AGI); you can look into languages targetting those.
Inform is a more modern language for text adventures.
Ink is an open-source embeddable language for dialog trees and story puzzles. You’ll need to bring your own game engine, but there’s a Unity3d plugin to help.
Inform is the most direct descendant of Zork. It was inspired by the work of Infocom, a company founded by most of the authors of the MIT Zork. Folks especially enamored of Zork should start there. Inform has some support for displaying images.
Inform is not a descendant of Zork, it has no connection to it besides producing output files in ZMachine / Z-Code format, which is well-specified so that anyone can write a generator.
As far as programming the actual story goes, it's an independent implementation based on entirely different principles (Zork was written in MDL which was a Lisp).
I'm not an expert in this, but I think Twine is one well-supported option. In general the genre is called "Interactive Fiction" these days, and there's a bunch of engines for it, both graphical and non-. There's a broad overview here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction#Software
MDL is a lisp descendent so you might find lisp an avenue worth investigating. I'd never seen MDL (or heard of it) before looking at this, but even before I googled to make sure, I could tell that it was heavily based on lisp.
This is kind of weird to see because I can remember back in the 90's doing Infocom re-releases at Activision. Activision bought Infocom in the late 80's, so in theory they owned all the source code to games like Zork. I remember going through back up of old Infocom drives, there were some really good design ideas. But not the actual source code for their text adventure engine.
Having been exposed to the original (I believe from DECUS tapes but I am unsure from this distance in time) back in the 70s' I played the BSD fortran cross-port on machines I had, but the thing is, the nostalgia kick is satisfied from low degrees of engagement.
I think my personal tabular room-connectivity map I hand crafted in vi is still lurking on backup media, it was fun making it.
I'm kind of curious about the license status of this. Zork has been commercially sold (on iOS) within the last 10 years, and I don't quite know how this source would be MIT's to give away, unless there is a deal with whatever legal entity owns Infocom's intellectual property these days.
That's great, and I did not mean to cast aspersions on the legality or ethics of the release. I just was somewhat uncomfortable not to see any mention of legal terms in the repo, or a mention that the authors were OK with the release.
As far as I understand, some MIT legal department OK'ed this release. Your question about a license is of course very legitimate, and someone posted a GitHub issue about it.
Infocom sold derivative works of this, so its seems to me that they would have some rights to this code.
If it was some sort of non-exclusive license, there should be no problem, because the authors seem to be on board with the release.
If the authors transferred their copyright to Infocom upon forming the company, then this code is technically no longer theirs to give away, especially since the IP rights were subsequently re-sold (maybe even multiple times).
I agree with others in this discussion that at this point, the code most likely has primarily academic/historical value. But that would not necessarily stop an owner from suing a deep pocketed entity like MIT.
IANAL, but one could assume that a similar policy to the copyright of a thesis or dissertation would apply here, which is to say that the students retained copyright (if they did not create the work "for hire" under a grant), but the University keeps a non-exclusive license to republish for pedagogical, scholarly, or administrative reasons. Arguably a open source dump like this definitely fits scholarly if not pedagogical uses.
But it's an interesting gray area certainly, as Zork was probably not "properly" prepared as a thesis/dissertation including MIT's recommended explicit statement granting the above non-exclusive license: "The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part." [1]
"Access to collections in the Department of Distinctive Collections is not authorization to publish. Separate written application for permission to publish must be made to Distinctive Collections. Copyright of some items in this collection may be held by respective creators, not by the creating office."
So, I don't know, does seem a bit on the legal edge?
I think the publishers have decided that no lawyer/IP owner worth their salt would make a case of this and publishing is a benefit to historical computing.
First time I've seen CodeMeta - does anyone have any experience and opinions of it? Looks like it's optimized for citations and doesn't really help with how to execute the code.
Maybe Dockerfile is becoming the programmer's version of what this codemeta.json file is doing (I guess for researchers)?
This is amazing, On the same day this was going up, I was talking to my son about text based games and saying I always wanted to play zork but never have
None. There never was a license, so no rights were granted and strictly speaking it's "All rights reserved", but the authors are treating it as 'abandonware'.
