Description
A bunch of university kids at MIT (soon to be the guiding lights behind
Infocom) played the pioneering cave-crawling treasure-hunting text adventure
ADVENTURE and thought "Hey, we can improve on that!" Around June of 1977 they pooled their collected creative juices and cranked out a sassy successor in MDL on a PDP-10. It didn't have a name, so they just used a hacker nonsense word in place of one temporarily -- "Zork."
This game presented the next in a long line of treasure-hunting protagonists with a vast Great Underground Empire to explore -- provided their lantern didn't run out of juice -- and whimsical obstacles among the Flatheadian ruins forced players to employ lateral thinking to collect wondrous treasures worth thousands of zorkmids... and deposit them in the trophy case back aboveground. If this sounds
familiar, it's no coincidence --
Zork/Dungeon is the primordial clay from which the
first three games of the Zork series were fashioned, following some extensive refitting of set pieces -- due to the game's
enormous size of
one megabyte, making it commercially available for home microcomputers, with their limited memory and storage capabilities, was not considered a viable plan in 1979... until they came up with the idea of segmenting the giant dungeon up.
(Ports of this game also exist for VMS, the Acorn Archimedes, and the
Z-code,
TADS and GLK software platforms.)
Alternate Titles
- "Zork" -- original name
- "ZDungeon" -- Z-code port
- "Mainframe Zork" -- to distinguish from later home conversions
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Trivia
After considering turning their free Zork online game into a marketable product, the MIT gang planned on re-branding it
Dungeon, a name with perhaps less personality but a more immediate suggestion of its contents; two different pressures would convince them to revert to their original name. From one side, they determined that the DEC hacker who purloined their source code was distributing his version under the name "Dungeon"; on the other, they were subjected to legal pressure from an unnamed rising RPG company who didn't want the public to become confused over the copyright status of certain game properties involving Dungeons.
Sticking with "Zork" turned out to be the least complicated way to maintain a distinct identity for their product, and after verifying that they wouldn't be confused or in conflict with Mattel's "Mighty Zork" motorcycle model or the Zork Hardware Company of El Paso and Albuquerque, they were on their way to making Zork the most famous piece of hacker jargon in computer gaming history.
