Zork Grand Inquisitor

September 4, 1997

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."

For those unfamiliar with Zork history, I thought it best to begin with a little recitation of the chronicles of Zork.

Zork is one of the oldest computer games. It dates back to June 1977 when a group of students at MIT decided to experiment with a parser (a programming routine that reads text, decodes it, and makes decisions based on the commands) and create a game using it.

After a couple of years of starts and spurts and lots of late nights, Zork (also known as Dungeon) was born. It was entirely text, with textual descriptions of locations, textual instructions for interacting with the game, and textual responses from characters. Visual depictions were left to the player's imagination. (Zork by the way was a nonsense word meaning "incomplete program." The name was intended to be temporary but was never changed.) Various people around the ARPAnet (a predecessor of the Internet) found out about the game, played it, and its popularity caught on.

Eventually, the programmers who wrote Zork/Dungeon (a Mac copy can be found on AOL) started Infocom and published the original Zork as three games: Zork I, II, and III. The very first game I bought was Zork I. Zork I, II, and III were followed by scores of Zork games as well as many other interactive fiction games.

Click here to find out more about the history of Infocom

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