[HN Gopher] 1977: Zork
___________________________________________________________________
1977: Zork
Author : fanf2
Score : 214 points
Date : 2021-02-18 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| pugworthy wrote:
| As someone that first played Adventure on a teletype in 1976, I
| always seem to take affront to article titles implying Zork was
| there first.
|
| In this case "50 years of text games" is the substack name, and
| this is just the entry for Zork in 1977.
|
| See https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure for the real deal.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| the very first sentence says that Adventure was first.... :-/
| iainctduncan wrote:
| True, but they really raised the bar with their parser!
| dang wrote:
| If curious, from the archives:
|
| _Zork source and binaries, January 1978_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371538 - Sept 2020 (13
| comments)
|
| _Zork source code, 1977_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108626 - May 2020 (81
| comments)
|
| _Exploring Zork (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731333 - Aug 2019 (22
| comments)
|
| _Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home
| Computers_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19982345 - May
| 2019 (17 comments)
|
| _A Brief History of Zork (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946781 - May 2019 (10
| comments)
|
| _Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide, and other Infocom
| games_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436 - April
| 2019 (238 comments)
|
| _Z3 - The Zork CPU_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169565 - Sept 2017 (11
| comments)
|
| _The DUNGEON (Zork I) source_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15147346 - Sept 2017 (50
| comments)
|
| _Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138114 - Aug 2017 (32
| comments)
|
| _The Enduring Legacy of Zork_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073227 - Aug 2017 (48
| comments)
|
| _Beyond Zork_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524438 -
| Nov 2015 (9 comments)
|
| _Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual
| Games_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705269 - June 2011
| (133 comments)
|
| Others?
| throwaway123x2 wrote:
| Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and
| publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type
| stories?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Logo Adventure:
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
| ineptech wrote:
| "Interactive Fiction" is probably the search term you need.
| Might start here:
| http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ#How_can_I_write_my_own_g...
| tomku wrote:
| Twine: https://twinery.org
| throwaway123x2 wrote:
| This looks great, thank you!
| immigrantsheep wrote:
| Inky as well https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
| the_af wrote:
| This.
|
| While TADS, Inform and others are sophisticated tools (more
| like programming languages, really) to build adventures like
| Zork or even more complex, for a simple Choose Your Own
| Adventure something like Twine is better.
| TheHideout wrote:
| If you're interested in trying to do it in Rust, I've made a
| series of simple text games that you could use as an example
| [0]. Rust will work for web and someone has added web support
| for these, but I haven't merged it in yet.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Syn-Nine/rust-mini-games
| screaminghawk wrote:
| I've used this angular framework in the past with great success
| https://github.com/danielstern/cyo
|
| Searching "cyoa" on github brings back a tons of results that
| you can filter through to meet your tech stack needs.
| moreoutput wrote:
| Let me shamelessly plug a project I'll probably always be
| poking at: https://github.com/MoreOutput/RockMUD
|
| I mainly played DIKU stuff so it feels a bit like that OOTB,
| but its very flexible (i hope).
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| FWIW: In one of my classes, the teacher taught us Prolog by
| making us write a text adventure using it. It turned out to be
| well suited to the task. Except for the "publish to the web
| part".
|
| https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~matuszek/cis554-2015/Assignments/...
| senkora wrote:
| The people I know who have done this have used Inform:
| http://inform7.com
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The tool to publish a Choose Your Own Adventure story to the
| web is just HTML. You have passages of text that link to other
| passages of text.
| samizdis wrote:
| You can also use Google Forms, and embed those within Google
| Sites. I've been doing this to create media training
| exercises for interviewing techniques, and they've been
| popular with the journalism students.
| SethMurphy wrote:
| Zork was responsible for my initial interest in computer
| programming (and first program in BASIC, forever lost). Probably
| loved it because it was so much like a choose your own adventure
| book of the times.
| daniel5151 wrote:
| One of the coolest technical aspects of early Infocom text
| adventure games is that most games weren't actually written using
| native assembly code for the platforms they ran on, and were
| instead compiled down to "z-code", a bytecode which ran on the
| "z-machine" virtual machine architecture. Z-machines are pretty
| niftly little bits of tech, as while they have a lot in common
| with regular 'ol machine code, the z-machine spec also includes
| dedicated instructions for fetching text input from the user,
| outputting text to the console, saving/loading data to disk,
| etc...
|
| Having games target the abstract z-machine platform made it
| incredibly easy for Infocom to port games across platforms, as
| instead of re-writing every game from scratch, they could simply
| write a z-machine interpreter for said platform, and immediately
| gain access to their entire adventure game catalog!
|
| A happy side-effect of all this is that it's super easy to run
| these classic adventure games on modern platforms, as instead of
| emulating the UI/UX of a 80s microcomputer, it's possible to
| write a z-machine interpreter that takes full advantage of modern
| GUIs.
|
| One of my personal favorite modern z-machine interpreters is
| `encrusted` [1], which is written in Rust that runs on the Web
| thanks to WebAssembly. As a fun side-project, I ended up forking
| the project and making `embcrusted` [2], a z-machine interpreter
| that can run on embedded platforms without a full C-library. In a
| weekend or two of hacking, I was able to port a z-machine
| interpreter to my mechanical keyboard, in order to get the
| "authentic" experience of playing a text-adventure game through a
| teletype :)
|
| [1] https://github.com/DeMille/encrusted
|
| [2] https://github.com/daniel5151/embcrusted
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I used to play a lot of z-machine text adventures on the
| original iPod Touch with an app called Frotz. It was pretty
| cool to see stuff from the 80s running on a modern tiny
| portable computer like that.
| simmons wrote:
| I was reading an article about the Z-Machine recently [1], and
| I was quite surprised that in addition to being a virtual
| machine, it also implemented virtual memory! Thus, pages could
| be swapped in and out of disk as needed. (Since CPUs like the
| 6502 didn't have a hardware MMU, I guess this was an explicit
| software step -- i.e. a called function that would check if the
| page was loaded, and if not, arrange for its load.)
|
| With a virtual machine, virtual memory, and (for the time) a
| great natural language parser, it shows that the Infocom folks
| learned their craft in world of academia, high-end computer
| hardware, and ideas, instead of the more amateur (at the time)
| world of microcomputer enthusiasts.
|
| [1] https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Has anyone built a CYOA based on verbal input? Is there an
| available toolset with which to do so?
| pmiller2 wrote:
| You could do that with whatever interactive fiction tools you
| want, combined with some form of speech to text software. For
| instance, Inform 7 for your IF tool, and any of the following
| for speech to text: https://www.lifewire.com/state-of-linux-
| voice-recognition-22...
|
| That said, I'm not sure how good any of those speech to text
| tools actually are, so, this might be kind of a pipe dream at
| the moment.
|
| Also, I know you meant "Choose Your Own Adventure," but my
| immediate first thought was "Cover Your Own Ass." I may have
| spent too much time in corporate America. :/
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Thanks. It really is the voice to text that is the concern. I
| noodled around with an interactive fiction game concept a
| while back focused on a nuclear showdown.
|
| I wanted to build it into an red analog telephone. The phone
| would ring and you would hear a message from various
| government/military types.
|
| As tensions rise, the phone rings more often, possibly
| multiple lines light up forcing you to catch/miss vital
| information or opportunities.
|
| Inevitably, things go pear-shaped and you try to (prevent?) a
| first strike/retaliatory strike.
|
| Truthfully, I don't have the skills to build the device, but
| plotting out the narrative, writing the dialogue would be
| fun.
| aaronareed wrote:
| This is an incredible game idea and you should absolutely
| make this because I want to play it!
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Why would the device need to be any more complicated than a
| bluetooth speaker and microphone driven by a Raspberry Pi
| or something? That effectively reduces all the engineering
| necessary to making a case for the Pi that looks like a red
| rotary or push button phone, and stuffing a speaker and mic
| into the handset.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Right. That is clearly the general answer. Ideally - I
| would like it to be an actual red push button telephone
| with multiple lines to add complexity to the narrative -
| but simpler would be a fine start.
|
| Edit: basically - put a game inside this
| https://share.icloud.com/photos/0IH5hOBO_KECT2gSpzd5-n_4g
| pmiller2 wrote:
| That doesn't seem terribly tough, either, given that the
| Pi has 40 GPIO pins:
| https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/physical-
| comput...
|
| A push button is literally one of the most trivial things
| you can wire up to GPIO. You can also interact with GPIO
| in Python pretty easily: https://www.raspberrypi.org/docu
| mentation/usage/gpio/python/...
| iainctduncan wrote:
| The fact that one of them was working on a PhD on a lisp variant
| makes a whole lot of sense. No wonder. Great article!
| doggydogs94 wrote:
| The old 1970s era Star Trek game is available on iOS; command
| line interface replaced with a few buttons. It is called Old
| Trek.
| not2b wrote:
| I played Zork via the Arpanet in 1978. (Yes, I'm "experienced").
| A friend showed me how to reach the net via a local phone call,
| even though we were in a school computer lab Washington, DC and
| were accessing a machine at MIT. We had a 300 baud modem and a
| DECwriter terminal; we wasted a lot of paper playing the game.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Stationfall Planetfall A mind forever voyaging (still have it on
| my shelf)
|
| Classics.
| krumpet wrote:
| I'm still playing Zork (Planetfall, Enchanter, and Deadline too)
| and have been since the early 80s. Even though I've never solved
| them, they never fail to warm my heart. Along with my collection
| of dusty, hand drawn maps I journey onward! Thanks for the
| memories, Infocom.
| lolive wrote:
| Definitely off-topic, but I was fond of a textual adventures on
| my father's MacSE. There was anyway an image alongside the text
| to illustrate the descriptions. It started in a monastery, where
| everyone had disappeared. You had to travel around and grab
| things. And (bug or not), you were sometimes teleported to an
| arena where you had to fight a T. rex. I cannot remember anything
| else. But I spent an awful lot of time figuring out how to win
| that game (and died 99.9% of the times because of that T. rex).
| the_af wrote:
| You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
|
| and It is pitch black. You are likely to be
| eaten by a grue.
|
| are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my
| mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!
| ctdonath wrote:
| I reached the last chamber in Adventure. Never did figure out
| what to do next & last.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| And how could I forget! xyzzy
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I first tried my hand on Zork about 15 years ago, and I never
| finished it too, probably only 5-10% done on my end. But the
| experience was pretty good for that short play. Yeah and I got
| eaten by the grue...
| jansan wrote:
| I was late for Zork and only played "Hitchiker's Guide to the
| Galaxy" with friends. This essential command I will always
| remember: Take tea and no tea
| slices wrote:
| So that's the solution!
|
| That was one of life's greatest unsolved mysteries for me.
| The hours I spent trying to figure that out...
| mwcremer wrote:
| Most of Infocom classics can be found at e.g.
| https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1
| blackrock wrote:
| > You are in an open field west of a big white house, with a
| boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
|
| This reminds me of that hypnotic phrase from the 12 Monkeys tv
| series.
|
| Anyways, whatever happened to these types of games? Did it just
| die out as computers got more powerful, and everyone just played
| first-person shooters or 3d role playing games?
| tomku wrote:
| There are still people making new works of interactive fiction,
| including in the parser-based style of Adventure or Zork. You
| can find a lot of the more recent games on IFDB[0] and general
| info about IF and the community on IFWiki[1]. Most modern
| parser games are built for VMs with interpreters available for
| many operating systems and types of devices, with Lectrote[2]
| being a common recommendation for desktop platforms.
|
| [0]: https://ifdb.tads.org
|
| [1]: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page
|
| [2]: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Without first checking, I can confidently say you'll probably
| be able find a good modern interactive fiction game on itch.io.
| markbnj wrote:
| I have Zork from Infocom in the original packaging with 5.25
| floppies... wonder if it's worth anything?
| mongol wrote:
| Ebay has this for USD 80
| keyle wrote:
| This isn't like an old camera that can still be used to shoot
| amazing pictures... Your floppies are mostly sentimental. The
| game is wildly available online and even on the web as web app.
|
| I'd recommend you frame them carefully and hang them in pride
| on your wall.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| There's going to be lots of these anecdotes, but Zork was the
| first computer game I ever obsessed over, on my cousin's C64.
| Hand-drawn maps and notes about clues, getting eaten by the grue
| on purpose, getting frustrated at the maze of twisty passages,
| and of course entering random curse words just to be scolded by
| the game. Much more recently, I played a web-browser based port
| of the game and even accounting for nostalgia, it held up for me!
| easton_s wrote:
| "kill troll with sword" was my mavis beacon
| iainctduncan wrote:
| I often think I owe Infocom my career! I believe it was hugely
| valuable to have started hobby hacking at a young age, and Zork
| was what made we want to do it. Their language parser was just so
| cool. Like many of you I'm sure, a text adventure game was my
| final project in computer science at high school too. :-)
| sethammons wrote:
| my favorite thing I did on zork so many moons ago was something
| very much like: > kill self with what?
| > self sorry, you do not have the you
|
| I will forever remember that I do not have the you.
| narrator wrote:
| Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork
| where you can do basically anything and the game will come back
| with something that's at least interesting.
|
| It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text
| first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.
| chongli wrote:
| It's amusing but it's not a game. It will respond with
| something (often amusing) to any promos you write but there
| aren't any rules to what you get back and there are no puzzles
| to solve.
|
| Zork, on the other hand, is an actual game you can solve,
| complete with a scoring system.
| haolez wrote:
| I think aidungeon would be very similar to a game if it
| remembered the past sentences that the player and the AI have
| input so far. So far, it seems to create a new context from
| scratch for each and every sentence from the player.
| crtasm wrote:
| Has there been any major updates in the last 6months or so? It
| was a lot of fun to play around with but didn't remember all my
| earlier decisions so felt pretty inconsistent.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s_
|
| Early 80's via BBSes, online services, and BBS networks like
| ARBnet. BBS play was slow, but it was so novel and compelling,
| you didn't care.
| narrator wrote:
| Those BBS games back in the day were only 1 or 2 people
| though because they required one to tie up a phone line to
| play and most home setups couldn't support more than a few
| nodes, at least until the 90s.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Those BBS games back in the day were only 1 or 2 people_
|
| Not entirely. Even with phone connections, networks like
| ARB could do multi-player. But they turn-based, and as I
| said, took a long time.
|
| If you wanted more real-time, you went with something like
| CI$.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Some material for those that want to dig further:
|
| 1. Get Lamp, a documentary film on text adventures and Infocom, a
| legendary publisher of test adventure games.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp
|
| 2. Twisty Little Passages by By Nick Montfort. A book applying
| literary critique to text adventure games.
|
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twisty-little-passages
| m463 wrote:
| When I first played what is now called zork, it was called
| dungeon.
| VadimPR wrote:
| If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still
| around. https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing
| them!
|
| (bias: I'm the project lead)
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| And don't forget that MUDs led to the wider field of
| "interactive fiction," which covers MUDs but also a bunch of
| other really fascinating ways of telling stories with
| interactive text. There are oodles of them at
| https://ifcomp.org/ and https://ifdb.tads.org/
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I have not played MUDs in a long time, but, when I did, I
| always just got by with Tintin++. I never went all the way and
| wrote an actual bot that could run unattended, because there
| were so many different things that could really mess up your
| bot, or, at least cause it to act impolite, that it looked like
| more trouble than it was worth. Also, I wasn't that great at
| scripting with tt++. :P I was, however, (literally) a wizard
| with LPC.
| aurelius12 wrote:
| Hi Vadi! Sarapis here. ;)
|
| He's right, Mudlet is the best desktop client out there for
| Mudding with. This is the part where I mention that I run a
| company with five MUDs ranging from almost 24 years live to
| just a couple years live. https://ironrealms.com
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Five! To think I've been goofing off with MUDs for personal
| projects the last 20 years and have only written maybe .05 of
| a MUD.
| Ciph wrote:
| I used to be a cat-like dual wielding rapier knight with
| totem-skills, had a lot of fun with my old guild until the RP
| requirements were dropped. Still z thank you and the rest of
| the gang fort giving me so much fun and be able to meet so
| many nice people. I'm sure my character (Shearr) is still
| gathering dust somewhere :-)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-18 23:00 UTC)