Zork
| Zork | |
|---|---|
 Zork being played on a Kaypro CP/M computer | |
| Genre | Text, Adventure |
| Release date | 1982 |
| Developer | Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling; commercial version: Infocom |
| Code license | MIT-0[1]; commercial version: MIT[2] |
| P. language | MDL; commercial version: ZIL |
| Contribute | |
| Zork is a free game. This means that the source code is available to be studied, modified, and distributed. Most projects look for help with testing, documentation, graphics, etc., as well. | |
Zork, aka Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master, is a text-based adventure game initially written by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling and later published commercially by Infocom for PCs. The game was initially written for PDP-10 mainframe computer in MDL and later, after it proved to be popular, the game was expanded and released commercially. For commercial release the game was rewritten in the Zork Implementation Language (ZIL) which compiled into instructions for Z-machine. This made it possible to port the game to new platforms simply by porting the Z-machine interpreter itself, making the game logic platform independent. Due to its size, the commercial release necessitated splitting the game into three parts.
The source code of the original MIT version was published as a part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapes of Tech Square collection in 2020 and released under the MIT No Attribution license in 2022[3]. The source code of the commercial version was released under an MIT license in 2025[2].
Gameplay[edit]
The main goal is to collect treasures spread throughout many interconnected areas. The unnamed player avatar is controlled by typing commands in a natural language, the result of which is then described by the narrator. Compared to the Adventure, which inspired it, the natural language parser is not limited to two word commands and is able to process more complex phrases, e.g., ones containing adjectives.
External links[edit]
- Zork MIT version source code
- Zork I: The Great Underground Empire source code
- Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz source code
- Zork III: The Dungeon Master source code
- Zork on Wikipedia
- Z-machine on Wikipedia
- ZIL Forever, a modern ZIL compiler