History of Zork - Revision history

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Larsbrinkhoff: /* The History of Zork -- First in a Series */ Link to Maze War

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‎The History of Zork -- First in a Series: Link to Maze War

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Neozeed at 13:26, 9 February 2009

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inital.. version seperated from zork

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-The history of [[zork]] can be found here http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html
+The history of [[Zork]] can be found here http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html
-The History of [[Zork]]
+The History of Zork
 This is the history of the most famous of all interactive fiction games: Zork. It was written by Tim Anderson and Stu Galley and appeared in three issues of The New Zork Times.
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 == The History of Zork Second in a Series ==
 by Tim Anderson
 When last seen, Zork(R) was a small game (probably slightly more than half the size of the final mainframe version) that ran on one computer. Although it was only six weeks old, and had never been advertised, it had a relatively large user community from all over the country. In some ways it was better than the classic Adventure at this time, but mostly it was the next game to come along, and it wasn't even the only contender.
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 == The History of Zork The Final (?) Chapter: MIT, MDL, ZIL, ZIP ==
-by Stu Galley
+by Stu Galley<br>
 Special To The New Zork Times
 The year: 1979. As Tim Anderson has recounted in previous installments in this series, Zork was one large computer game, about a megabyte in size -- as large as it could be and still fit in its original home, a DECsystem-10. Marc Blank and Dave Lebling designed and wrote the program, with the help of Bruce Daniels and Tim. They had met and worked together in a research group at M.I.T., and now the group was losing valuable talent through graduation and the lure of "the real world." Several members of the group believed that they could still produce outstanding computer-based products in almost any category -- from programming languages like MDL (an important influence on modern Lisp) to data bases, electronic mail and artificially intelligent systems -- if only centrifugal force didn't separate them.

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 Around 1970, the ARPAnet was invented. ARPAnet made it possible for researchers all over the country (indeed, all over the world) to communicate with each other, and to use each other's machines. In those halcyon days, access was unrestricted; you could get on from any machine connected to the net, or by knowing an appropriate phone number. Budding hackers from around the country soon discovered that this made a wonderful playground. They also discovered that there were some computers at MIT with some neat stuff on them and no security -- anyone who could connect to the machines could log in.
-Also around 1970, a language called MUDDLE (later renamed MDL) was developed as a successor to LISP. It never succeeded in fully replacing LISP, but it developed a loyal user community of its own, primarily at MIT's Project MAC (now called the Laboratory for Computer Science) and especially in the Dynamic Modelling Group (later the Programming Technology Division). The Dynamic Modelling Group (DM), in addition to its other accomplishments, was responsible for some famous games. The first of these was a multi-player graphics game called Maze, in which players wandered around a maze shooting each other. Each user's screen showed the view of the maze that his or her computerized alter-ego saw, updated in real time. Dave Lebling was among those chiefly responsible (to blame?) for the existence of the game.
+Also around 1970, a language called MUDDLE (later renamed MDL) was developed as a successor to LISP. It never succeeded in fully replacing LISP, but it developed a loyal user community of its own, primarily at MIT's Project MAC (now called the Laboratory for Computer Science) and especially in the Dynamic Modelling Group (later the Programming Technology Division). The Dynamic Modelling Group (DM), in addition to its other accomplishments, was responsible for some famous games. The first of these was a multi-player graphics game called [[Maze War|Maze]], in which players wandered around a maze shooting each other. Each user's screen showed the view of the maze that his or her computerized alter-ego saw, updated in real time. Dave Lebling was among those chiefly responsible (to blame?) for the existence of the game.
-The next game of note was Trivia (who says research labs aren't ahead of their time?), an ongoing "can you top this" contest for the truly crazed. Trivia, unlike Maze, could be played by network users, and achieved wide popularity on the ARPAnet. Marc Blank wrote the second version, and I maintained/hacked it; it was actually a legitimate test of a database system the group used for a research project.
+The next game of note was Trivia (who says research labs aren't ahead of their time?), an ongoing "can you top this" contest for the truly crazed. Trivia, unlike [[Maze War|Maze]], could be played by network users, and achieved wide popularity on the ARPAnet. Marc Blank wrote the second version, and I maintained/hacked it; it was actually a legitimate test of a database system the group used for a research project.
 In early 1977, Adventure swept the ARPAnet. Willie Crowther was the original author, but Don Woods greatly expanded the game and unleashed it on an unsuspecting network. When Adventure arrived at MIT, the reaction was typical: after everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving the game (it's estimated that Adventure set the entire computer industry back two weeks), the true lunatics began to think about how they could do it better. Adventure was written in FORTRAN, after all, so it couldn't be very smart. It accepted only two-word commands, it was obviously hard to change, and the problems were sometimes not everything one could desire. (I was present when Bruce Daniels, one of the DM'ers, figured out how to get the last point in Adventure by examining the game with a machine-language debugger. There was no other way to do it.)
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 The first major addition to the game, done in June 1977, was the river section, designed and implemented by Marc. It survives largely unchanged in Zork I, but illustrates very well the problems of building reality. There were minor problems of consistency -- some parts of the river were sunlit (and even reachable from outside), but others were dark. The major problem resulted from the new concept Marc introduced: vehicles. In the original game, there were rooms, objects, and a player; the player always existed in some room. Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms. This required changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs, objects, and rooms (we had to have some way of making "walk" do something reasonable when the player was in the boat). In addition, ever-resourceful Zorkers tried to use the boat anywhere they thought they could. The code for the boat itself was not designed to function outside the river section, but nothing kept the player from carrying the deflated boat to the reservoir and trying to sail across. Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but the general problem always remained: anything that changes the world you're modelling changes practically everything in the world you're modelling.
 Although Zork was only a month old, it could already surprise its authors. The boat, due to the details of its implementation, turned into a "bag of holding": players could put practically anything into it and carry it around, even if the weight of the contents far exceeded what a player was allowed to carry. The boat was two separate objects: the "inflated boat" object contained the objects, but the player carried the "deflated boat" object around. We knew nothing about this: someone finally reported it to us as a bug. As far as I know, the bug is still there.
 == The History of Zork Second in a Series ==

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 The History of [[Zork]]
 This is the history of the most famous of all interactive fiction games: Zork. It was written by Tim Anderson and Stu Galley and appeared in three issues of The New Zork Times.
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 == The History of Zork -- First in a Series ==
 by Tim Anderson
 In the beginning, back in the 1960's, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) created the PDP-10, a medium-sized computer. The "10", as it was called, became popular at many research installations, and a great deal of software was written for it, some of which is still far in advance of systems on more modern machines. At MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, an operating system called ITS (Incompatible Time-sharing System) was written for the 10. ITS was designed to make software development easy. The designers of the system assumed that it would have a small, knowledgeable, friendly group of users, so they did not include any security features.
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 * In December 1984, after a long legal tangle with Software Arts over VisiCalc, Visicorp eventually merged into one of its own spin-off companies and disappeared.

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:26, 9 February 2009
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−	The history of zork can be found here http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html	+	The history of [[zork]] can be found here http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html


−	The History of Zork	+	The History of [[Zork]]