(2017-08-23) The Four Mit Grads Who Created Zork In Their Off Hours Call It A Good Hack

The four MIT grads who created Zork in their off hours call it “a good hack”

During its 1980s heyday, commercial versions of Zork released for personal computers sold more than 800,000 copies.

Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—who between them earned seven MIT degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, political science, and biology—bonded over their interest in computer games

In early 1977, a text-only game called Colossal Cave Adventure - originally written by MIT grad Will Crowther—was tweaked and distributed over the ARPANET by a Stanford graduate student. “The four of us spent a lot of time trying to solve Adventure,” says Lebling. “And when we finally did, we said, ‘That was pretty good, but we could do a better job.

The parser, which the group continued to fine-tune, allowed Zork to understand far more words than previous games, including adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, and complex verbs. That meant Zork could support intricate puzzles

Vibrant, witty writing set Zork apart

founded the software company Infocom. Its first product: a modified version of Zork, split into three parts, released over three years, to fit PCs’ limited memory size and processing power.

Ben Brown, founder and CEO of Howdy.ai, says Zork helped him design AI-powered chatbots. “Zork is a narrative, but embedded within it are clues about how the user can interact with and affect the story,”

Brown’s chatbot, Howdy, operates similarly, using bold and highlighted fonts to draw attention to keywords, like “check in,” and “schedule,” that people can use to communicate with the bot.

Jessica Brillhart, a filmmaker who creates virtual-reality videos, also cites Zork as an influence: “It provides a great way to script immersive experiences and shows how to craft a full universe for people to explore

Commercial versions of the game were written in a programming language called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL) that ran within a virtual machine on top of personal computers

In 1981, Infocom reacquired the rights to Zork from Personal Software and redesigned the game’s packaging

Inputting “Unlock” when confronted with a locked grate could yield the responses “The grate is unlocked” or “You can’t reach the lock from here” or “It doesn’t seem to work,” depending on the player’s possessions and location.

This snippet of code, written in ZIL, is an example of the way Zork handled verbs that players typed

The following year, Infocom licensed Zork to a company called Personal Software, which distributed the first commercial version.