A Brief History of Zork or 'Eaten by a Grue'
owl writes:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29885/eaten-grue-brief-history-zork
Zork is a text-based video game, a genre also known as "interactive fiction," whose defining feature is the absence of typical video game graphics. Instead, the game's environments and the actions you take are described for you. For example, the first line of Zork is, "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." Using a series of simple commands, you direct the main character to do something, like "open mailbox." To which the game will reply, "Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet." Naturally, you would then "take leaflet," "read leaflet", and then maybe "walk east" to get to the house. The story unfolds from there as you collect items, like a sword, a lantern, rope, and other adventuring necessities, before entering a vast, underground cave where you'll face enemies inspired by The Lord of the Rings, like elves, trolls, and the darkness-lurking grue.
The young geeks got the idea for Zork from the first text-based video game, Adventure (also called Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT, because the computer it ran on could only use so many letters in the command line). Adventure was created in 1976 by Will Crowther, a student at Stanford, as a simulation of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, with a few Tolkien-esque fantasy elements thrown in by fellow Stanfordite Don Woods. The MIT guys weren't impressed with Adventure's limited two-word command structure ("kill troll"), so they wrote Zork to understand complete sentences ("kill troll with sword").
Originally, Zork and Adventure were both written for the PDP-10, a room-sized computer mainframe that was popular with universities in the late-1970s. Adventure was written in a very common programming language called FORTRAN, so copies of the game spread rapidly among mainframe users. Zork, however, was written with MDL, a more specialized language that wasn't as popular. So, for a while, the only way to play Zork was to log on to the MIT PDP-10 through ARPAnet, an early version of the internet, and run it remotely. Zork was never officially announced to the world; people just heard about it through ARPANet, making it an early viral sensation.
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