16 ms·

Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and other Infocom games

705 points by laurent123456 8y ago

atesti 8y ago
Is it possible to download all these 136 repositories at once?
- filchermcurr 8y ago
  curl -s "https://api.github.com/users/historicalsource/repos?per_page=300" https://api.github.com/users/historicalsource/repos?per_page... | grep \"clone_url\" | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/"//g' -e 's/,//g' | xargs -n1 git clone
laurent123456 8y ago
Announcement: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1118005126457888768 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1118005126457888768
andrewstuart 8y ago
Alas no Trinity - the greatest IF game of all time.
- pm215 8y ago
  Er, Trinity is there: https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity
  - andrewstuart 8y ago
    You're right. Good news. You should play it if you haven't and if you love IF. Along with The Enchanter, which is equally good, if not better.
laurent123456 8y ago
There is no existing compiler for all this programming language any more. Maybe someone will give it a try and create an interpreter.
- jacobush 8y ago
  There are plenty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
  - jperry 8y ago
    Z-Machines aren't compilers, they're virtual machines that can execute the compiled output. There's no (known) compiler that still exists that can compile ZIL into Z-code. edit: except for zilf, as mentioned, but it's not functional for even zork 1.
    - taradinoc 8y ago
      Not functional? Warnings aren't errors. Maybe it's just better at catching potential bugs...
    - fsiefken 8y ago
      judging from the blog comment it seems that it's functional
    - david-given 8y ago
      ZILF works just fine. There's even a competition for games written in ZIL using it: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/767016233740109/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/76701623374...
  - fsiefken 8y ago
    you mean interpreters, but this is about compilers of which there are only two: Zilch en ZILF.
- pm215 8y ago
  A commenter on Zarf's blog ( https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code.html#comment-form https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) reports that ZILF is capable of at least building the Zork source to something that will start up, though given the warnings produced during compilation it's not going to work perfectly...
andrewstuart 8y ago
This is the correct link, not the one on the HN post: https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories As a zipfile because someone is bound to get that repo taken down. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf4ninh/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf...
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Yea, therer's no information on how it was obtained or the license, other than "not considered to be under an open license" I wonder if this IP is currently owned by Activision/Blizzard
- dpezet 8y ago
  It looks like they might have added some things since you made your archive. The zip you posted is missing the following repos: stationfall suspect suspended trinity wishbringer witness zork-german zork zork1 zork2 zork3
  - stoolpigeon 8y ago
    stationfall had a book released with it that I thought was hilarious at the time.
  - speps 8y ago
    They are in the zip but GDrive cuts the listing of folders with "...".
- fenomas 8y ago
  Regarding where these files came from: > The source code was contributed anonymously and represents a snapshot of the Infocom development system at time of shutdown - there is no remaining way to compare it against any official version as of this writing, and so it should be considered canonical, but not necessarily the exact source code arrangement for production. (From the "witness" readme, and presumably other repos)
vectorEQ 8y ago
https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home could zilf compile it? (i am not familiar with this language at all...)
- japanoise 8y ago
  Only way to find out is to try :) But it does look promising.
- chkuendig 8y ago
  It does, at least Zork runs, see http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code.html http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source... and https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/38990 https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/38990
willvarfar 8y ago
So, are these playable online over gh-pages? It would be so cool if the gh-pages contained an interpreter that loaded the source from github.
- pja 8y ago
  The compiler for these source files has been lost. You can play the zip files that were released commercially with Parchment, but because the copyright on those has not expired you wont be able to do so legally on the public internet I believe.
  - evilotto 8y ago
    https://iplayif.com/?story=https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/raw/master/COMPILED/zork1.z3 https://iplayif.com/?story=https://github.com/historicalsour...
  - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
    Not quite lost.
- shdon 8y ago
  If you're just looking to play the games, they are in the internet archive's software library in many versions. At the very least the DOS version and Amiga version, probably others too, are playable through the online emulators.
- liveoneggs 8y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN... This adds some "graphics". I personally love this format for these games.
PaulHoule 8y ago
My that looks like LISP!
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Basically the history goes Lisp -> MDL -> ZIL
  - taradinoc 8y ago
    MDL and Lisp kinda co-evolved, and some MDL features (lambda lists, maybe others?) made it into the evolutionary branch that lived.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
      Basically correct. The first Lisp for MIT's IBM mainframe was ported to the AI lab PDP-6, running standalone. Later ITS was written for the PDP-6, and Lisp was ported to run under timesharing by 1968. This evolved into Maclisp. MDL, first called Muddle, is mentioned in Project MAC Progress Report VIII, covering 1970-971. "The extension of LISP is known locally as "MUDDLE". It was designed and has been implemented by Carl Hewitt and Gerald Sussman of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Christopher Reeve, David Cressey, Bruce Daniels, and Gregory Pfister of Dynamic Modeling". Ideas from Muddle made it back to Maclisp. The first Lisp Machine Lisp (later ZetaLisp) was basically a reimplementation or Maclisp (as is Emacs Lisp), and Common Lisp is to a large degree a subset of Lisp Machine Lisp.
- m463 8y ago
  I vaguely remember in the original zork (I think it was called "dungeon" at the time) you got into some super-secret room and some secret message said "MEMQ" in it. Can't see it in any of the source here.
ashton314 8y ago
YYYAAAAAAASSSSSSS
philipodonnell 8y ago
> In general, Infocom games were created by taking previous Infocom source code, copying the directory, and making changes until the game worked the way the current Implementor needed. Structure, therefore, tended to follow from game to game and may or may not accurately reflect the actual function of the code. Some things never change... EDIT: this is how I do most of my personal projects!
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, they worked for them, so why should they?
  - z3t4 8y ago
    I think the parent means that is still how we do software, eg. coyping resembling code and modifying it until it does what we want.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      And I mean "If it works for modern devs too, so?"
      - sythe2o0 8y ago
        The parent isn't saying it is bad practice.
      - flatline 8y ago
        For OP’s personal projects? Meh, it works but will sometimes cause you problems. For a team of 10+ software devs? Disaster!
- bantunes 8y ago
  I think this has to do with the authors being more literary than tech savvy.
  - 8y ago
Buetol 8y ago
Found some funny scripts used for the unreleased game "The restaurant": https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/things.zap#L49 https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/t...
- speps 8y ago
  Note that this is probably based on the the sequel[1] to H2G2 given that H2G2 was completed as game. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_the_Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_t...
  - pwiecz 8y ago
    You can find a somewhat playable early "prototype" linked from here: https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      What might have been if Infocom hadn't tried to "grow up" and make business software.
      - bluGill 8y ago
        The name Infocom comes from their desire to make business software. To a large extent they considered games that they had written in the past to be a way to raise money so they could afford to make the business software that would make them rich. Games were always a distraction in their eye - a profitable one, but not their purpose. As far as I know they never got anywhere with business software...
        WorldMaker 8y ago
        I realize. Still doesn't mean I can't lament them for not realizing they were already successful and could continue to be. Just imagine if BioWare had kept trying to make medical software despite the success of their RPGs, just because their name said they should.
Graham24 8y ago
"Zork I is a 1980 interactive fiction game" Surely, these were called Adventure Games at the time. I never recall them being called that.
- icebraining 8y ago
  The box art calls it Interactive Fiction: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_art.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_ar... EDIT: Some more info on the origins; apparently it was first used by an early creator of such games (Robert Lafore), and then picked up by Infocom: https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fiction/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fi...
  - reshie 8y ago
    that would be the right term. you can see the evolution in cga vga games like quest for glory 1 or kings guest 1 or even space quest 1 you still had the console style input but was replaced with the menu bars that most remember from adventure games.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      Even games like Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island where the ability to input text commands was gone retained a pseudo-commandline above the lower part of the screen with the verbs and inventory.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Note that those boxes are not the original boxes. I’d have to research to figure out timelines but basically Infocom games came out in all sorts of shapes and sizes of which Starcross may have been the most elaborate. But at some point they standardized on the standard box form factor because of the demands of retailers. I remember them as being called text adventures but as your link says they officially shifted to IF at some point.
- icedchai 8y ago
  When I played these in the 80's, we just called them "text adventures." The box did say Interactive Fiction... Nobody called them that.
bredren 8y ago
Hitchhikers Guide was one of the first PC games I ever got. I had no idea it was a “text adventure.” Nor did I understand it was based on a book. My dad got it for me used from The Computer Club in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon. I picked it out largely due to the green guy on the front of the box. I remember being delighted by all the weird stuff it came with, including a small packet of fuzz, and other artifacts from the story. I didn’t know why they were in the box but it was weird and that appealed to me. Even though I was raised by Nintendo games like RC Pro AM, I spent many hours trying to figure out how to advance in HG. Often starting over from scratch. Eventually, I got the book, read it and attempted the game again, and though the context made it more fun, I think I still got stuck somewhere around where you put the Babel fish in your ear.
- jerf 8y ago
  It is an extremely difficult game. In theory, I know the answer to all the puzzles, however, there are so many ways to lose without realizing it that I've never managed to string together a single play session in which I do it correctly. Though I've also long since stopped trying. :) For instance, there are subareas where you must collect various tools. Many of these are themselves rather fragile affairs, easy to ruin. At the end of the game, to open a door, you will be asked for a certain random tool. However, this is not a matter of collecting 8 out of 10 tools and having an 80% chance at the end; if you are missing even a single one, the game will draw its random selection from the tools you do not have. IIRC this is also after a point-of-no-return. The Babel fish puzzle is another example of the evilness of the game. While this one is possible to complete without a guide, it isn't possible to complete it on your first attempt. There is a machine that will vend the Babelfish. It will fail in various ways, such as vending the fish into areas you can't get to if you don't block that direction. You have a limited number of tries before the Vogons come to get you and it's a game over if you don't have the fish at that point. However, the amount of time you have is not sufficient to go through the loop of trying the machine, fixing the problem it reveals, trying the machine again, fixing the next problem, etc. There are simply too many problems and not enough time. You have to simply memorize/write down the solutions once, then next time directly implement them in what would appear to be a psychic manner next game. (There's also an early "silent failure" state here; if you did not pick up the junk mail from your house, you lose here.) If you wrote down an objective standard to measure an adventure or text game by, such as "should not have unlabeled no-win situations", or "should be solvable on the first play (even if hard)", or other such things, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game would flagrantly fail most of them. Whether it's a bad game, I leave that to the reader, but it certainly breaks a lot of rules.
alexhutcheson 8y ago
I don't see it here, but Bureaucracy[1] was also really great. The whole premise of the game was that you are trying to change your address with your bank after a move. It's never that easy... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
- pmarreck 8y ago
  I agree, loved this one! The satire ran thick there
- frabcus 8y ago
  It's there! https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy
spoppy 8y ago
I saw this extra feature on the downloadable special edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series a little while back, which talks about the engine behind the infocom game and the language that it's programmed in. BBC Micro Live - Douglas Adams BBC Micro Live presenter, Conner 'Freff' Cochran, talks to Douglas Adams about The Hitchhiker's Guider to the Galaxy computing game and future software plans. https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/594990580873976/?v=594990580873976 https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/594990580873976/?...
kronin 8y ago
"Want some rye?" "'course ya do!"
- Maultasche 8y ago
  I still say that to this day. I was stuck at that part of the game for so long that this has never left me.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Here's to us.
  - anjc 8y ago
    Who's like us!
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      Daaaaamn few;
      - Maultasche 8y ago
        And they're all dead!
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  Great game, was my introduction to the Zork world. Like 8bit/16bit games, I wish video capture adventure games would make a comeback, even though I know it's a pipe dream...
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    There was a Tex Murphy game (Tesla Effect) released in the last couple of years (and was Kickstarter backed), and Her Story made a big splash slightly more recently than that. Several Her Story inspired productions since have been in the works or released. They'll probably never be mainstream/"AAA" again, but there likely will continue to be some people building them so long as they can find their audience. Plus, AAA game mo-capping has gotten to the point where some of them such as Uncharted and Quantum Break feel very close to classic FMV, with the benefits of a full 3D environment. Quantum Break even had entire "TV episodes" in the middle, making it perhaps the wildest "FMV" game of the last few years.
bencollier49 8y ago
No license anywhere. These games are still valuable IP aren't they?
- klez 8y ago
  At the bottom of the README > This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license. So all rights reserved, basically
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Not too bad really. This code is so old I doubt anyone really knows how to work with it properly or get it running on a modern machine. Only good for curiosity
- duskwuff 8y ago
  Not especially. The last Infocom/Activision Zork game was released in 1997. (There was a licensed browser game in 2009-11, but it sucked -- it was really just a demonstration of how little Activision cared about the IP.)
jordanpg 8y ago
I love interactive fiction (as these types of games are now denoted) then and now. In principle. There are possibilities with the text-only canvas that are not even conceivable in other media. But really, does anyone have time for these games anymore? Playing these Infocom games is a multi-month project, with a significant amount of note-taking, manual mapping, and patience (read: replay) required. To call the "parser" interface limiting is an understatement, especially where it concerns dialog. See https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl and https://hadeanlands.com/ https://hadeanlands.com/ for modern examples. They've tremendously expanded on the old guard, both in technological terms and in creativity, and yet still suffer from the same fundamental limitations. I don't know what the future holds for IF, but more evolution is needed before these games can compete for mindshare in the 21st century. I read a lot, but I just can't make the time for these kinds of games anymore. Not even close.
- textfiles 8y ago
  I don't think the posting of the source code was meant to encourage you to play the games.
- neetodavid 8y ago
  My friend made a twine game (no longer online, lost to time, darn) that I absolutely loved. It used the hyperlink interface as a way to dive deeper into ideas. And to meander and reflect.. eventually to navel gaze.. Text parsing is probably still a clumsy interface if the goal is to write natural language commands, but if the designer goes with the grain of the interface there is plenty of opportunity for compelling work
- adelrune 8y ago
  Have you tried any of the modern games other than the two you linked ? A lot of the games being made right now are shorter and punchier than the classic infocom games. Suveh nux (https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3 https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3) is a great example of a modern game that is short, interesting and uses the medium in an interesting manner.
outside1234 8y ago
Is there any good modern analogue to Infocom games that I can plan on my iPhone slowly?
- brians 8y ago
  Yes! All the Zarfhome stuff, like Hadean Lands or Dreamhold. Deathless: City's Thirst and Choice of the Deathless, both set in Max Gladstone's lawyers-are-wizards-are-lawyers "Craft" series.
- i_don_t_know 8y ago
  Frotz is available on the AppStore. It's an interpreter for these types of games. The base install includes several games and you can download more from within the app through the link to the IFDB.
- jackhack 8y ago
  Slowly? the iPhone is many thousands of times more capable than any of the target systems these software were built for -- typical was a 1 megahertz 8-bit CPU with 32 kilobytes of RAM. Even the most inefficient ZIL interpreter will spend most of its time in a stall loop.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    I think “play slowly” in this case means “take it out during odd moments of the day such as waiting in a line or riding a bus and poke at the puzzles instead of catching up on Twitter”. I am pretty sure that even a first-generation ZIL interpreter spent the bulk of its cycles flashing the cursor and waiting for the player to type something.
    - jackhack 8y ago
      Thank you - that makes perfect sense. I obviously forgot that there's a human element to all this.
    - aaaaaar 8y ago
      I thought "slowly" was a reference to the reduced typing speed on the phone.
donretag 8y ago
Each game (from the ones I recognize) fit on a single 5.25" 360KB floppy. We barely think in megabytes anymore.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Even less -- Except for the later mixed text/graphics ones like Shogun, they were on 8-bit computers like the Apple II and C64 as well. Those had single-sided 5.25 disks only storing 100Kb-150Kb.
- jackhack 8y ago
  and ran in < 40 kilobytes of RAM on the Apple ][, less on TRS-80 and Commodore if I recall correctly. The game ran in a virtual machine built for various architectures so that the game could be built once and run anywhere. (Write once, run anywhere -- an idea that would later catch on with a certain programming language that is now displaying this text on your browser screen.) Those games felt miraculous back in the day. I still recall the amazement I felt playing the detective game Deadline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) ) and the way the simulation moved on in real time -- people wandering through a house, or suspects fidgeting nervously or offering additional info while I questioned them -- even if I didn't enter a command and merely waited. Appreciating the severe limitations it operated within makes it all the more amazing. Another fine example of "scarcity drives innovation." 40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow. That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only. If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games. Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. NES games, not so much. ASCII text isn't a terribly efficient medium of storage, and they didn't have much if any data compression in those days.
ThorinJacobs 8y ago
The notation for player death appears to be "JIGS-UP". Glad to see the classic Infocom sense of humor is present in the codebase too.
z3phyr 8y ago
Is that some kind of angle bracket lisp? Can anyone shed more light of zil files?
- Jabbermonkey 8y ago
  Take a look at the Z-machine wikipedia page. It has some good background. There's also a link to "Learning ZIL" in the external links section. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  It's exactly a Lisp derivative/fork. Zork was originally written in MDL [0], a Lisp derivative in use on MIT's mainframes (that in turn went on to inspire parts of Scheme). When the Zork team left college to form Infocom, they built ZIL to port Zork to home computers, based on their experience of MDL, and their needs for their Z-Machine virtual machine. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)
  - lispm 8y ago
    > Scheme don't know. But Lisp Machine Lisp and then Common Lisp.
    - brlewis 8y ago
      I've seen EQUAL? in some of the code snippets. I can believe that inspired Scheme predicates.
      - taradinoc 8y ago
        Yeah, MDL used the question mark suffix like Lisp used "p".
      - lispm 8y ago
        Yes. But I think that's relatively minor. From 'The Evolution of Lisp' Steele/Gabriel: > MDL also introduced through example the use of a final ? in a name to connote a predicate ... Lisp Machine Lisp would pick up the lambda lists and the locatives, and would adapt the evaluation and splicing markers in backquote, though the evolution of the concept passes through Conniver where it is refined into a form very similar in appearance and effect as in Lisp-Machine Lisp, but in fact the implementation is quite different. Scheme would pick up the use of a trailing “?” for predicates. MDL had a multitasking facility that would reappear in various forms in Lisp-Machine Lisp, Conniver, and various implementations of Common Lisp. Scheme got the '?'. LML got complex arglists, locatives, markers for evaluation/splicing in backquote, multitasking.
chrisbrandow 8y ago
This is a codebase I’ve long been interested in seeing. I just always assumed it would be inscrutable assembler, though I should have known better given the game’s lineage. Boy, this brings me way back to playing Zork on a 20 lb amber-screen ibm “portable”.
armitron 8y ago
Also relevant: https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet
zubairq 8y ago
Amazing Games!!! I still have boxed Amiga and ST Infocom games which I will probably never play, but keep just for the packaging!
newzisgud 8y ago
https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/87a3b787d166a441cab8d89d87f9a3753d40daa8/gverbs.zil#L1640 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/87a3b787d166a...
grifball 8y ago
<TELL " You are likely to be eaten by a grue.">)> <CRLF>
- duskwuff 8y ago
  -- https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs.zil#L1640 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs... The SPRAYED? global wasn't used in Zork I, but showed up in Zork II as the Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent.
  - lou1306 8y ago
    Just another reminder that the Zork trilogy started as a single PDP game, I guess :) It's remarkable how they were able to cut it up almost without breaking a sweat.
    - duskwuff 8y ago
      I wonder how much work it would be to glue the games back together?
      - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
        Or you could run the un-split original MDL Zork.
bitforger 8y ago
Reminds me of that time I hacked together Zork for the Google Home. You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG" https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  Oh, cool! I'd love for someone to make a more fully-baked version of this. Get some good audiobook narrators and voice actors, and add sound effects and stuff! Smart assistants, ironically, feel like the perfect medium for "text" adventure games to have a resurgence.
  - bitforger 8y ago
    I totally agree! I think this will be more true as we get better at natural language understanding. (coincidentally, this is my PhD research area) There's still a lot of unsolved problems for making this kind of stuff usable. But we can dream, haha, and we're getting closer. I think the possibilities for games are actually much more impressive than most people imagine, right now.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    Yes, possibly for single-player interactive fiction. But kids these days spend a lot of time in multi-person text conversations, pointing to a MUD resurgence. Maybe we'll see both.
  - anthk 8y ago
    There was a Zork interface for Asterisk, which allowed to play the game over VoIP and with Festival as a TTS.
phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
Something that I just learned about as a result of this story: According to this blog post[0], Brian Moriarty himself shared the source for the TRS-80 CoCo version of the official interpreter[1], so that's out there too. [0]https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter-source-for-coco-recovered.html https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter-source... [1]http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/Infocom%20Adventure%20Games%20Interpreter/ http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/...
pyreal 8y ago
I found a swear in the Hitchhiker's source code: https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/master/globals.zil#L671 https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/ma...
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  I can't find a definition for that, but it's used in several places. Is <FUCKING-CLEAR> a ZIL primitive??!
  - taradinoc 8y ago
    It's defined in verbs.zil. https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7fddb5ebf706e6b7ce2398169a4a987a8f8aeb2/verbs.zil#L2862 https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7...
- m463 8y ago
  "swear" you have failed the Leisure Suit Larry Age Verification. also, Toshiba is not a car.
b3lvedere 8y ago
Cool. I still got my Masterpieces of Infocom cdrom somewhere. I was very dissapointed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was not a part of the collection :)
ggm 8y ago
I used to enjoy the fortran-to-c ported pre-infocom zork on BSD. I never got into the bigger world they went with but friends spent many fine hours in them.
HeavyStorm 8y ago
I've just now realized why when the movie came out I had already heard about Hitchhiker's!
raldi 8y ago
If you're interested in this, you might appreciate I Spent My Weekend Hacking Zork: https://redd.it/10dtch https://redd.it/10dtch
wolco 8y ago
Just looking at the source code. Things haven't changed all that much.
johnmw 8y ago
If you have an interest in odd programming languages, the 'spiritual successor' to these games written in the Infocom ZIL language would be Inform7. I think it is quite a fascinating declarative language that reads much like English, for example: The same division between creating things, and laying down rules, is visible in Inform source text. The creation of the world is done by making unconditional factual statements about it. For example, The wood-slatted crate is in the Gazebo. The crate is a container. More info: http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html
- baruchel 8y ago
  IMHO, Inform6 (which is a true object-oriented programming language) is much more powerful than Inform7. I tried both and found that: I7 is not consistent and often ambiguous: some pieces of code would get broken after inserting a perfectly valid "sentence" with no explanation; compilation is slow, execution is slow; some tiny compiled text games with no picture and no sound weight more than 5Mo. If I had a large project to code, I would take I6 without a doubt.
  - taradinoc 8y ago
    Everything you said about I7 is true, but its real value comes from the abstractions it introduces. That is, it isn't just an English-like syntax for writers who are used to writing in complete sentences... it's a programming model based on concepts from narrative, technical writing, and linguistics, for writers who are using it to write narratives, describe technical systems, and manipulate text. I7 integrates high-level domain concepts of interactive fiction into the language: scenes and continuity, rules and their exceptions, relationships between objects, templates for parsing and printing text.
- anthk 8y ago
  Inform6 was first, and it was far easier to grasp than ZIL and Inform7 itself.
DonHopkins 8y ago
I wrote some comments on the Wikipedia Zork talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_original_Zork_source_code_in_MDL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_origin... Link to the original Zork source code in MDL I suggest linking to the original Zork source code in MDL which is available here: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/ http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/ Is it OK to link to that source code from Wikipedia? I don't know who officially owns it, though. It was never a commercial product, and was developed at MIT. As the Zork article mentions, the Zork source code was leaked way back in 1977, so the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. A link to the actual source code would be a nice thing to cite in that section. It is fascinating to read, and really beautiful code, quite understandable even if you don't know MDL, and practically a form of literature. I played the original Zork on MIT-DM and also the Infocom versions of course. Reading the source code is like seeing the behind-the-scenes underground rooms and passages at Disneyland! While I was playing Zork, I found a bug. First some context: when you're battling the troll, you can give things to him, and he eats them! Sometimes he drops his axe, and you can pick it up and kill him with it. He blocks the exits until you kill him. So I tried "give axe to troll," and he ate his own axe, then cowered in terror: "The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls." Not satisfied with that, I tried "give troll to troll", and he devoured himself: "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the troll and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it." ...Except that I still could not get out of the exit, because every time I tried, it said "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture." I figured there must be a troll flag that wasn't getting cleared when the troll devoured itself. And sure enough, I found it in the code, and it's called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG"! Here is an excerpt of the MDL troll code, where you can see the bug, where it should clear the troll flag when the troll devours itself, but doesn't (well that's how I would fix it!): <COND (<VERB? "THROW" "GIVE"> <COND (<VERB? "THROW"> <TELL "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the " 1 <ODESC2 <PRSO>>>) (<TELL "The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift">)> <COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "KNIFE">> <TELL "and being for the moment sated, throws it back. Fortunately, the troll has poor control, and the knife falls to the floor. He does not look pleased." ,LONG-TELL1> <TRO .T ,FIGHTBIT>) (<TELL "and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it."> <REMOVE-OBJECT <PRSO>>)>) (<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE"> <TELL "The troll spits in your face, saying \"Better luck next time.\"">) (<VERB? "MUNG"> <TELL "The troll laughs at your puny gesture.">)>) (<AND ,TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG <VERB? "HELLO">> <TELL "Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you.">)>> Xardox (talk) 02:45, 15 January 2013 (UTC) You can give something that you don't have? I was under the impression that it wouldn't work. Double sharp (talk) 13:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC) You can give anything that's in the room or your inventory to the troll. So if his axe falls on the floor, "give axe to troll" will work without having to pick it up first, which is supposed to work. But even before he drops the axe you can go "give axe to troll" and he'll eat it while he's holding it, since it's transitively in the room. That's the first thing I did, that made me think of typing "give troll to troll"! Xardox (talk) 03:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
sp332 8y ago
Looks like GitHub will quickly have support for syntax highlighting of ZIL files. https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497 https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497
- dcreager 8y ago
  It's live! https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118647837951004672 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118647837951004672
bcl 8y ago
For those of you who are new to text adventures you can find images of most of the game boxes here - http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/ http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/ and various other resources here http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ http://infocom.elsewhere.org/
DougN7 8y ago
Cool! Now, does anyone know the significance of ‘xyzzy’ and ‘plugh’? :)
- taradinoc 8y ago
  Here's a ZIL version of the game where "xyzzy" and "plugh" first appeared: https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/advent.zil?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/a...
  - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
    I have the oldest available Crowther version running using a DEC Fortran compiler. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING . AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
    - scruffyherder 8y ago
      I remember digging up these to run on simh https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-source-code/ https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-so... Do you have older ones?
      - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
        No, I got them from the same place.

705 points by laurent123456 8y ago

atesti 8y ago

Is it possible to download all these 136 repositories at once?

filchermcurr 8y ago
curl -s "https://api.github.com/users/historicalsource/repos?per_page=300" https://api.github.com/users/historicalsource/repos?per_page... | grep \"clone_url\" | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/"//g' -e 's/,//g' | xargs -n1 git clone

laurent123456 8y ago

Announcement: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1118005126457888768 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1118005126457888768

andrewstuart 8y ago

Alas no Trinity - the greatest IF game of all time.

pm215 8y ago
Er, Trinity is there: https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity
- andrewstuart 8y ago
  You're right. Good news. You should play it if you haven't and if you love IF. Along with The Enchanter, which is equally good, if not better.

laurent123456 8y ago

There is no existing compiler for all this programming language any more. Maybe someone will give it a try and create an interpreter.

jacobush 8y ago
There are plenty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
- jperry 8y ago
  Z-Machines aren't compilers, they're virtual machines that can execute the compiled output. There's no (known) compiler that still exists that can compile ZIL into Z-code. edit: except for zilf, as mentioned, but it's not functional for even zork 1.
  - taradinoc 8y ago
    Not functional? Warnings aren't errors. Maybe it's just better at catching potential bugs...
  - fsiefken 8y ago
    judging from the blog comment it seems that it's functional
  - david-given 8y ago
    ZILF works just fine. There's even a competition for games written in ZIL using it: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/767016233740109/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/76701623374...
- fsiefken 8y ago
  you mean interpreters, but this is about compilers of which there are only two: Zilch en ZILF.
pm215 8y ago
A commenter on Zarf's blog ( https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code.html#comment-form https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) reports that ZILF is capable of at least building the Zork source to something that will start up, though given the warnings produced during compilation it's not going to work perfectly...

andrewstuart 8y ago

This is the correct link, not the one on the HN post: https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories As a zipfile because someone is bound to get that repo taken down. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf4ninh/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf...

djsumdog 8y ago
Yea, therer's no information on how it was obtained or the license, other than "not considered to be under an open license" I wonder if this IP is currently owned by Activision/Blizzard
dpezet 8y ago
It looks like they might have added some things since you made your archive. The zip you posted is missing the following repos: stationfall suspect suspended trinity wishbringer witness zork-german zork zork1 zork2 zork3
- stoolpigeon 8y ago
  stationfall had a book released with it that I thought was hilarious at the time.
- speps 8y ago
  They are in the zip but GDrive cuts the listing of folders with "...".
fenomas 8y ago
Regarding where these files came from: > The source code was contributed anonymously and represents a snapshot of the Infocom development system at time of shutdown - there is no remaining way to compare it against any official version as of this writing, and so it should be considered canonical, but not necessarily the exact source code arrangement for production. (From the "witness" readme, and presumably other repos)

vectorEQ 8y ago

https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home could zilf compile it? (i am not familiar with this language at all...)

japanoise 8y ago
Only way to find out is to try :) But it does look promising.
chkuendig 8y ago
It does, at least Zork runs, see http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source-code.html http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-source... and https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/38990 https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/38990

willvarfar 8y ago

So, are these playable online over gh-pages? It would be so cool if the gh-pages contained an interpreter that loaded the source from github.

pja 8y ago
The compiler for these source files has been lost. You can play the zip files that were released commercially with Parchment, but because the copyright on those has not expired you wont be able to do so legally on the public internet I believe.
- evilotto 8y ago
  https://iplayif.com/?story=https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/raw/master/COMPILED/zork1.z3 https://iplayif.com/?story=https://github.com/historicalsour...
- larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
  Not quite lost.
shdon 8y ago
If you're just looking to play the games, they are in the internet archive's software library in many versions. At the very least the DOS version and Amiga version, probably others too, are playable through the online emulators.
liveoneggs 8y ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-game-30th-anniversary-edition https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN... This adds some "graphics". I personally love this format for these games.

PaulHoule 8y ago

My that looks like LISP!

jhbadger 8y ago
Basically the history goes Lisp -> MDL -> ZIL
- taradinoc 8y ago
  MDL and Lisp kinda co-evolved, and some MDL features (lambda lists, maybe others?) made it into the evolutionary branch that lived.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
    Basically correct. The first Lisp for MIT's IBM mainframe was ported to the AI lab PDP-6, running standalone. Later ITS was written for the PDP-6, and Lisp was ported to run under timesharing by 1968. This evolved into Maclisp. MDL, first called Muddle, is mentioned in Project MAC Progress Report VIII, covering 1970-971. "The extension of LISP is known locally as "MUDDLE". It was designed and has been implemented by Carl Hewitt and Gerald Sussman of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Christopher Reeve, David Cressey, Bruce Daniels, and Gregory Pfister of Dynamic Modeling". Ideas from Muddle made it back to Maclisp. The first Lisp Machine Lisp (later ZetaLisp) was basically a reimplementation or Maclisp (as is Emacs Lisp), and Common Lisp is to a large degree a subset of Lisp Machine Lisp.
m463 8y ago
I vaguely remember in the original zork (I think it was called "dungeon" at the time) you got into some super-secret room and some secret message said "MEMQ" in it. Can't see it in any of the source here.

ashton314 8y ago

YYYAAAAAAASSSSSSS

philipodonnell 8y ago

> In general, Infocom games were created by taking previous Infocom source code, copying the directory, and making changes until the game worked the way the current Implementor needed. Structure, therefore, tended to follow from game to game and may or may not accurately reflect the actual function of the code. Some things never change... EDIT: this is how I do most of my personal projects!

coldtea 8y ago
Well, they worked for them, so why should they?
- z3t4 8y ago
  I think the parent means that is still how we do software, eg. coyping resembling code and modifying it until it does what we want.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    And I mean "If it works for modern devs too, so?"
    - sythe2o0 8y ago
      The parent isn't saying it is bad practice.
    - flatline 8y ago
      For OP’s personal projects? Meh, it works but will sometimes cause you problems. For a team of 10+ software devs? Disaster!
bantunes 8y ago
I think this has to do with the authors being more literary than tech savvy.
- 8y ago

Buetol 8y ago

Found some funny scripts used for the unreleased game "The restaurant": https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/things.zap#L49 https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/t...

speps 8y ago
Note that this is probably based on the the sequel[1] to H2G2 given that H2G2 was completed as game. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_the_Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restaurant_at_the_End_of_t...
- pwiecz 8y ago
  You can find a somewhat playable early "prototype" linked from here: https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    What might have been if Infocom hadn't tried to "grow up" and make business software.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      The name Infocom comes from their desire to make business software. To a large extent they considered games that they had written in the past to be a way to raise money so they could afford to make the business software that would make them rich. Games were always a distraction in their eye - a profitable one, but not their purpose. As far as I know they never got anywhere with business software...
      - WorldMaker 8y ago
        I realize. Still doesn't mean I can't lament them for not realizing they were already successful and could continue to be. Just imagine if BioWare had kept trying to make medical software despite the success of their RPGs, just because their name said they should.

Graham24 8y ago

"Zork I is a 1980 interactive fiction game" Surely, these were called Adventure Games at the time. I never recall them being called that.

icebraining 8y ago
The box art calls it Interactive Fiction: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_art.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_ar... EDIT: Some more info on the origins; apparently it was first used by an early creator of such games (Robert Lafore), and then picked up by Infocom: https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fiction/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fi...
- reshie 8y ago
  that would be the right term. you can see the evolution in cga vga games like quest for glory 1 or kings guest 1 or even space quest 1 you still had the console style input but was replaced with the menu bars that most remember from adventure games.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Even games like Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island where the ability to input text commands was gone retained a pseudo-commandline above the lower part of the screen with the verbs and inventory.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Note that those boxes are not the original boxes. I’d have to research to figure out timelines but basically Infocom games came out in all sorts of shapes and sizes of which Starcross may have been the most elaborate. But at some point they standardized on the standard box form factor because of the demands of retailers. I remember them as being called text adventures but as your link says they officially shifted to IF at some point.
icedchai 8y ago
When I played these in the 80's, we just called them "text adventures." The box did say Interactive Fiction... Nobody called them that.

bredren 8y ago

Hitchhikers Guide was one of the first PC games I ever got. I had no idea it was a “text adventure.” Nor did I understand it was based on a book. My dad got it for me used from The Computer Club in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon. I picked it out largely due to the green guy on the front of the box. I remember being delighted by all the weird stuff it came with, including a small packet of fuzz, and other artifacts from the story. I didn’t know why they were in the box but it was weird and that appealed to me. Even though I was raised by Nintendo games like RC Pro AM, I spent many hours trying to figure out how to advance in HG. Often starting over from scratch. Eventually, I got the book, read it and attempted the game again, and though the context made it more fun, I think I still got stuck somewhere around where you put the Babel fish in your ear.

jerf 8y ago
It is an extremely difficult game. In theory, I know the answer to all the puzzles, however, there are so many ways to lose without realizing it that I've never managed to string together a single play session in which I do it correctly. Though I've also long since stopped trying. :) For instance, there are subareas where you must collect various tools. Many of these are themselves rather fragile affairs, easy to ruin. At the end of the game, to open a door, you will be asked for a certain random tool. However, this is not a matter of collecting 8 out of 10 tools and having an 80% chance at the end; if you are missing even a single one, the game will draw its random selection from the tools you do not have. IIRC this is also after a point-of-no-return. The Babel fish puzzle is another example of the evilness of the game. While this one is possible to complete without a guide, it isn't possible to complete it on your first attempt. There is a machine that will vend the Babelfish. It will fail in various ways, such as vending the fish into areas you can't get to if you don't block that direction. You have a limited number of tries before the Vogons come to get you and it's a game over if you don't have the fish at that point. However, the amount of time you have is not sufficient to go through the loop of trying the machine, fixing the problem it reveals, trying the machine again, fixing the next problem, etc. There are simply too many problems and not enough time. You have to simply memorize/write down the solutions once, then next time directly implement them in what would appear to be a psychic manner next game. (There's also an early "silent failure" state here; if you did not pick up the junk mail from your house, you lose here.) If you wrote down an objective standard to measure an adventure or text game by, such as "should not have unlabeled no-win situations", or "should be solvable on the first play (even if hard)", or other such things, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game would flagrantly fail most of them. Whether it's a bad game, I leave that to the reader, but it certainly breaks a lot of rules.

alexhutcheson 8y ago

I don't see it here, but Bureaucracy[1] was also really great. The whole premise of the game was that you are trying to change your address with your bank after a move. It's never that easy... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

pmarreck 8y ago
I agree, loved this one! The satire ran thick there
frabcus 8y ago
It's there! https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy

spoppy 8y ago

I saw this extra feature on the downloadable special edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series a little while back, which talks about the engine behind the infocom game and the language that it's programmed in. BBC Micro Live - Douglas Adams BBC Micro Live presenter, Conner 'Freff' Cochran, talks to Douglas Adams about The Hitchhiker's Guider to the Galaxy computing game and future software plans. https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/594990580873976/?v=594990580873976 https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/594990580873976/?...

kronin 8y ago

"Want some rye?" "'course ya do!"

Maultasche 8y ago
I still say that to this day. I was stuck at that part of the game for so long that this has never left me.
logfromblammo 8y ago
Here's to us.
- anjc 8y ago
  Who's like us!
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Daaaaamn few;
    - Maultasche 8y ago
      And they're all dead!
Dirlewanger 8y ago
Great game, was my introduction to the Zork world. Like 8bit/16bit games, I wish video capture adventure games would make a comeback, even though I know it's a pipe dream...
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  There was a Tex Murphy game (Tesla Effect) released in the last couple of years (and was Kickstarter backed), and Her Story made a big splash slightly more recently than that. Several Her Story inspired productions since have been in the works or released. They'll probably never be mainstream/"AAA" again, but there likely will continue to be some people building them so long as they can find their audience. Plus, AAA game mo-capping has gotten to the point where some of them such as Uncharted and Quantum Break feel very close to classic FMV, with the benefits of a full 3D environment. Quantum Break even had entire "TV episodes" in the middle, making it perhaps the wildest "FMV" game of the last few years.

bencollier49 8y ago

No license anywhere. These games are still valuable IP aren't they?

klez 8y ago
At the bottom of the README > This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license. So all rights reserved, basically
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Not too bad really. This code is so old I doubt anyone really knows how to work with it properly or get it running on a modern machine. Only good for curiosity
duskwuff 8y ago
Not especially. The last Infocom/Activision Zork game was released in 1997. (There was a licensed browser game in 2009-11, but it sucked -- it was really just a demonstration of how little Activision cared about the IP.)

jordanpg 8y ago

I love interactive fiction (as these types of games are now denoted) then and now. In principle. There are possibilities with the text-only canvas that are not even conceivable in other media. But really, does anyone have time for these games anymore? Playing these Infocom games is a multi-month project, with a significant amount of note-taking, manual mapping, and patience (read: replay) required. To call the "parser" interface limiting is an understatement, especially where it concerns dialog. See https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl and https://hadeanlands.com/ https://hadeanlands.com/ for modern examples. They've tremendously expanded on the old guard, both in technological terms and in creativity, and yet still suffer from the same fundamental limitations. I don't know what the future holds for IF, but more evolution is needed before these games can compete for mindshare in the 21st century. I read a lot, but I just can't make the time for these kinds of games anymore. Not even close.

textfiles 8y ago
I don't think the posting of the source code was meant to encourage you to play the games.
neetodavid 8y ago
My friend made a twine game (no longer online, lost to time, darn) that I absolutely loved. It used the hyperlink interface as a way to dive deeper into ideas. And to meander and reflect.. eventually to navel gaze.. Text parsing is probably still a clumsy interface if the goal is to write natural language commands, but if the designer goes with the grain of the interface there is plenty of opportunity for compelling work
adelrune 8y ago
Have you tried any of the modern games other than the two you linked ? A lot of the games being made right now are shorter and punchier than the classic infocom games. Suveh nux (https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3 https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3) is a great example of a modern game that is short, interesting and uses the medium in an interesting manner.

outside1234 8y ago

Is there any good modern analogue to Infocom games that I can plan on my iPhone slowly?

brians 8y ago
Yes! All the Zarfhome stuff, like Hadean Lands or Dreamhold. Deathless: City's Thirst and Choice of the Deathless, both set in Max Gladstone's lawyers-are-wizards-are-lawyers "Craft" series.
i_don_t_know 8y ago
Frotz is available on the AppStore. It's an interpreter for these types of games. The base install includes several games and you can download more from within the app through the link to the IFDB.
jackhack 8y ago
Slowly? the iPhone is many thousands of times more capable than any of the target systems these software were built for -- typical was a 1 megahertz 8-bit CPU with 32 kilobytes of RAM. Even the most inefficient ZIL interpreter will spend most of its time in a stall loop.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I think “play slowly” in this case means “take it out during odd moments of the day such as waiting in a line or riding a bus and poke at the puzzles instead of catching up on Twitter”. I am pretty sure that even a first-generation ZIL interpreter spent the bulk of its cycles flashing the cursor and waiting for the player to type something.
  - jackhack 8y ago
    Thank you - that makes perfect sense. I obviously forgot that there's a human element to all this.
  - aaaaaar 8y ago
    I thought "slowly" was a reference to the reduced typing speed on the phone.

donretag 8y ago

Each game (from the ones I recognize) fit on a single 5.25" 360KB floppy. We barely think in megabytes anymore.

jhbadger 8y ago
Even less -- Except for the later mixed text/graphics ones like Shogun, they were on 8-bit computers like the Apple II and C64 as well. Those had single-sided 5.25 disks only storing 100Kb-150Kb.
jackhack 8y ago
and ran in < 40 kilobytes of RAM on the Apple ][, less on TRS-80 and Commodore if I recall correctly. The game ran in a virtual machine built for various architectures so that the game could be built once and run anywhere. (Write once, run anywhere -- an idea that would later catch on with a certain programming language that is now displaying this text on your browser screen.) Those games felt miraculous back in the day. I still recall the amazement I felt playing the detective game Deadline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) ) and the way the simulation moved on in real time -- people wandering through a house, or suspects fidgeting nervously or offering additional info while I questioned them -- even if I didn't enter a command and merely waited. Appreciating the severe limitations it operated within makes it all the more amazing. Another fine example of "scarcity drives innovation." 40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.
- magduf 8y ago
  >40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow. That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only. If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games. Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. NES games, not so much. ASCII text isn't a terribly efficient medium of storage, and they didn't have much if any data compression in those days.

ThorinJacobs 8y ago

The notation for player death appears to be "JIGS-UP". Glad to see the classic Infocom sense of humor is present in the codebase too.

z3phyr 8y ago

Is that some kind of angle bracket lisp? Can anyone shed more light of zil files?

Jabbermonkey 8y ago
Take a look at the Z-machine wikipedia page. It has some good background. There's also a link to "Learning ZIL" in the external links section. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
WorldMaker 8y ago
It's exactly a Lisp derivative/fork. Zork was originally written in MDL [0], a Lisp derivative in use on MIT's mainframes (that in turn went on to inspire parts of Scheme). When the Zork team left college to form Infocom, they built ZIL to port Zork to home computers, based on their experience of MDL, and their needs for their Z-Machine virtual machine. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)
- lispm 8y ago
  > Scheme don't know. But Lisp Machine Lisp and then Common Lisp.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    I've seen EQUAL? in some of the code snippets. I can believe that inspired Scheme predicates.
    - taradinoc 8y ago
      Yeah, MDL used the question mark suffix like Lisp used "p".
    - lispm 8y ago
      Yes. But I think that's relatively minor. From 'The Evolution of Lisp' Steele/Gabriel: > MDL also introduced through example the use of a final ? in a name to connote a predicate ... Lisp Machine Lisp would pick up the lambda lists and the locatives, and would adapt the evaluation and splicing markers in backquote, though the evolution of the concept passes through Conniver where it is refined into a form very similar in appearance and effect as in Lisp-Machine Lisp, but in fact the implementation is quite different. Scheme would pick up the use of a trailing “?” for predicates. MDL had a multitasking facility that would reappear in various forms in Lisp-Machine Lisp, Conniver, and various implementations of Common Lisp. Scheme got the '?'. LML got complex arglists, locatives, markers for evaluation/splicing in backquote, multitasking.

chrisbrandow 8y ago

This is a codebase I’ve long been interested in seeing. I just always assumed it would be inscrutable assembler, though I should have known better given the game’s lineage. Boy, this brings me way back to playing Zork on a 20 lb amber-screen ibm “portable”.

armitron 8y ago

Also relevant: https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet

zubairq 8y ago

Amazing Games!!! I still have boxed Amiga and ST Infocom games which I will probably never play, but keep just for the packaging!

newzisgud 8y ago

https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/87a3b787d166a441cab8d89d87f9a3753d40daa8/gverbs.zil#L1640 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/87a3b787d166a...

grifball 8y ago

duskwuff 8y ago
-- https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs.zil#L1640 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs... The SPRAYED? global wasn't used in Zork I, but showed up in Zork II as the Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent.
- lou1306 8y ago
  Just another reminder that the Zork trilogy started as a single PDP game, I guess :) It's remarkable how they were able to cut it up almost without breaking a sweat.
  - duskwuff 8y ago
    I wonder how much work it would be to glue the games back together?
    - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
      Or you could run the un-split original MDL Zork.

bitforger 8y ago

Reminds me of that time I hacked together Zork for the Google Home. You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG" https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Oh, cool! I'd love for someone to make a more fully-baked version of this. Get some good audiobook narrators and voice actors, and add sound effects and stuff! Smart assistants, ironically, feel like the perfect medium for "text" adventure games to have a resurgence.
- bitforger 8y ago
  I totally agree! I think this will be more true as we get better at natural language understanding. (coincidentally, this is my PhD research area) There's still a lot of unsolved problems for making this kind of stuff usable. But we can dream, haha, and we're getting closer. I think the possibilities for games are actually much more impressive than most people imagine, right now.
- brlewis 8y ago
  Yes, possibly for single-player interactive fiction. But kids these days spend a lot of time in multi-person text conversations, pointing to a MUD resurgence. Maybe we'll see both.
- anthk 8y ago
  There was a Zork interface for Asterisk, which allowed to play the game over VoIP and with Festival as a TTS.

phjesusthatguy3 8y ago

Something that I just learned about as a result of this story: According to this blog post[0], Brian Moriarty himself shared the source for the TRS-80 CoCo version of the official interpreter[1], so that's out there too. [0]https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter-source-for-coco-recovered.html https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter-source... [1]http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/Infocom%20Adventure%20Games%20Interpreter/ http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/...

pyreal 8y ago

I found a swear in the Hitchhiker's source code: https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/master/globals.zil#L671 https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/ma...

DonHopkins 8y ago
I can't find a definition for that, but it's used in several places. Is <FUCKING-CLEAR> a ZIL primitive??!
- taradinoc 8y ago
  It's defined in verbs.zil. https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7fddb5ebf706e6b7ce2398169a4a987a8f8aeb2/verbs.zil#L2862 https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7...
m463 8y ago
"swear" you have failed the Leisure Suit Larry Age Verification. also, Toshiba is not a car.

b3lvedere 8y ago

Cool. I still got my Masterpieces of Infocom cdrom somewhere. I was very dissapointed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was not a part of the collection :)

ggm 8y ago

I used to enjoy the fortran-to-c ported pre-infocom zork on BSD. I never got into the bigger world they went with but friends spent many fine hours in them.

HeavyStorm 8y ago

I've just now realized why when the movie came out I had already heard about Hitchhiker's!

raldi 8y ago

If you're interested in this, you might appreciate I Spent My Weekend Hacking Zork: https://redd.it/10dtch https://redd.it/10dtch

wolco 8y ago

Just looking at the source code. Things haven't changed all that much.

johnmw 8y ago

If you have an interest in odd programming languages, the 'spiritual successor' to these games written in the Infocom ZIL language would be Inform7. I think it is quite a fascinating declarative language that reads much like English, for example: The same division between creating things, and laying down rules, is visible in Inform source text. The creation of the world is done by making unconditional factual statements about it. For example, The wood-slatted crate is in the Gazebo. The crate is a container. More info: http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html

baruchel 8y ago
IMHO, Inform6 (which is a true object-oriented programming language) is much more powerful than Inform7. I tried both and found that: I7 is not consistent and often ambiguous: some pieces of code would get broken after inserting a perfectly valid "sentence" with no explanation; compilation is slow, execution is slow; some tiny compiled text games with no picture and no sound weight more than 5Mo. If I had a large project to code, I would take I6 without a doubt.
- taradinoc 8y ago
  Everything you said about I7 is true, but its real value comes from the abstractions it introduces. That is, it isn't just an English-like syntax for writers who are used to writing in complete sentences... it's a programming model based on concepts from narrative, technical writing, and linguistics, for writers who are using it to write narratives, describe technical systems, and manipulate text. I7 integrates high-level domain concepts of interactive fiction into the language: scenes and continuity, rules and their exceptions, relationships between objects, templates for parsing and printing text.
anthk 8y ago
Inform6 was first, and it was far easier to grasp than ZIL and Inform7 itself.

DonHopkins 8y ago

I wrote some comments on the Wikipedia Zork talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_original_Zork_source_code_in_MDL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_origin... Link to the original Zork source code in MDL I suggest linking to the original Zork source code in MDL which is available here: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/ http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/ Is it OK to link to that source code from Wikipedia? I don't know who officially owns it, though. It was never a commercial product, and was developed at MIT. As the Zork article mentions, the Zork source code was leaked way back in 1977, so the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. A link to the actual source code would be a nice thing to cite in that section. It is fascinating to read, and really beautiful code, quite understandable even if you don't know MDL, and practically a form of literature. I played the original Zork on MIT-DM and also the Infocom versions of course. Reading the source code is like seeing the behind-the-scenes underground rooms and passages at Disneyland! While I was playing Zork, I found a bug. First some context: when you're battling the troll, you can give things to him, and he eats them! Sometimes he drops his axe, and you can pick it up and kill him with it. He blocks the exits until you kill him. So I tried "give axe to troll," and he ate his own axe, then cowered in terror: "The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls." Not satisfied with that, I tried "give troll to troll", and he devoured himself: "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the troll and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it." ...Except that I still could not get out of the exit, because every time I tried, it said "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture." I figured there must be a troll flag that wasn't getting cleared when the troll devoured itself. And sure enough, I found it in the code, and it's called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG"! Here is an excerpt of the MDL troll code, where you can see the bug, where it should clear the troll flag when the troll devours itself, but doesn't (well that's how I would fix it!): <COND (<VERB? "THROW" "GIVE"> <COND (<VERB? "THROW"> <TELL "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the " 1 <ODESC2 <PRSO>>>) (<TELL "The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift">)> <COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "KNIFE">> <TELL "and being for the moment sated, throws it back. Fortunately, the troll has poor control, and the knife falls to the floor. He does not look pleased." ,LONG-TELL1> <TRO .T ,FIGHTBIT>) (<TELL "and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it."> <REMOVE-OBJECT <PRSO>>)>) (<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE"> <TELL "The troll spits in your face, saying \"Better luck next time.\"">) (<VERB? "MUNG"> <TELL "The troll laughs at your puny gesture.">)>) (<AND ,TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG <VERB? "HELLO">> <TELL "Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you.">)>> Xardox (talk) 02:45, 15 January 2013 (UTC) You can give something that you don't have? I was under the impression that it wouldn't work. Double sharp (talk) 13:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC) You can give anything that's in the room or your inventory to the troll. So if his axe falls on the floor, "give axe to troll" will work without having to pick it up first, which is supposed to work. But even before he drops the axe you can go "give axe to troll" and he'll eat it while he's holding it, since it's transitively in the room. That's the first thing I did, that made me think of typing "give troll to troll"! Xardox (talk) 03:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

sp332 8y ago

Looks like GitHub will quickly have support for syntax highlighting of ZIL files. https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497 https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497

dcreager 8y ago
It's live! https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118647837951004672 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118647837951004672

bcl 8y ago

For those of you who are new to text adventures you can find images of most of the game boxes here - http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/ http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/ and various other resources here http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ http://infocom.elsewhere.org/

DougN7 8y ago

Cool! Now, does anyone know the significance of ‘xyzzy’ and ‘plugh’? :)

taradinoc 8y ago
Here's a ZIL version of the game where "xyzzy" and "plugh" first appeared: https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/advent.zil?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/a...
- larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
  I have the oldest available Crowther version running using a DEC Fortran compiler. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING . AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    I remember digging up these to run on simh https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-source-code/ https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-so... Do you have older ones?
    - larsbrinkhoff 8y ago
      No, I got them from the same place.