The Zork reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Zork

Zork, one of the first works of interactive fiction (a form of adventure game), was an early descendent of ADVENT (also known as Colossal Cave). The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language. All four were members of the Dynamic Modelling Group at the MIT AI Lab.

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker slang for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck.

The software company Personal Software released Zork I, which corresponded to roughly the first third of the original Zork, for the Apple II and TRS-80 home/ personal computers in 1980. In order to port the game onto a multitude of platforms, many of which had strict memory restrictions, the programmers developed a specialized virtual machine called the Z-machine. Personal Software intended to release Zork II as well, but was unsuccessful.

Zork 's original programmers eventually founded Infocom, which released versions of Zork for most popular computers of the era, including as the Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bit family, and the IBM PC, among others. Each game was issued on a a 5¼" floppy disk.

Zork is set in a sprawling underground labyrinth. The player is a nameless adventurer, whose goal is to find the treasures hidden in the caves and return with them alive. The dungeons were stocked with many novel creatures and objects, among them grues and zorkmids. The Zork universe and timeline was often extended into Infocom's other works of interactive fiction.

Zork and its relatives are works of interactive fiction. It distinguished itself in its genre as an especially rich game, both in terms of the quality of the storytelling, as well as the sophistication of its text parser, which was not limited to simple verb-noun commands ("hit grue"), but understood full sentences ("hit the grue with the sword").

The original Zork Trilogy:

• Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980)
• Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (1981)
• Zork III: The Dungeon Master (1982)

The Enchanter Trilogy also took place in the Zork universe and is considered to be part of the Zork series:

• Enchanter (1983)
• Sorcerer (1984)
• Spellbreaker (1985)

Later Infocom additions to the series:

• Beyond Zork (1987)
• Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988, with graphics)

Even later Activision additions to the series:

• Return to Zork (1993, with graphics)
• Zork: Nemesis (with graphics)
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1998, with graphics)
• Zork: The Undiscovered Underground

External links

• Zork I, II, III and the Undiscovered Underground can be downloaded from http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/. (Other games in the Zork series are apparently not legally available for free.) They can be played on almost any platform using an appropriate Z-machine interpreter.
• A slightly modified hack of Zork can be played interactively in a web browser at http://thcnet.net/zork/

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