32 ms·

1977: Zork

280 points by fanf2 6y ago

the_af 6y ago
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!
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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...
- ctdonath 6y ago
  I reached the last chamber in Adventure. Never did figure out what to do next & last.
- the_af 6y ago
  And how could I forget! xyzzy
  - psychstudio 6y ago
    So iconic in fact that it's the name of the annual IF awards AFAIR.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ci5er 6y ago
  How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)
  - ci5er 6y ago
    Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"
- danielrpa 6y ago
  I've recently played the entire Infocom text adventure catalog using walkthroughs. Yes, it feels somewhat like reading a book (although it's more "active" - hard to explain), but you get to experience a lot of what made the stories great. If you just want to finish Zork, I recommend this approach.
throwaway123x2 6y ago
Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?
- tomku 6y ago
  Twine: https://twinery.org https://twinery.org
  - the_af 6y ago
    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.
  - immigrantsheep 6y ago
    Inky as well https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
    - pimlottc 6y ago
      This is the engine behind the fantastic game 80 Days, for those who don’t know. Highly recommended.
  - throwaway123x2 6y ago
    This looks great, thank you!
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Logo Adventure: https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapin-logo-4c684a240b53 https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
- ineptech 6y ago
  "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_game.3F http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ#How_can_I_write_my_own_g...
sillyquiet 6y ago
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!
- waltwalther 6y ago
  Yes! Those hand drawn maps. Brings back memories..
narrator 6y ago
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.
- crtasm 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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$.
    - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
      Compuserve had a multi-player game called British Legends (also known as MUD 1) in the mid 80s. I very fondly remember paying $6.25 an hour to play at 300 baud. You can still play it here: https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/ https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/
JoeDaDude 6y ago
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 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 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twisty-little-passages
blackrock 6y ago
> 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?
- lapetitejort 6y ago
  Without first checking, I can confidently say you'll probably be able find a good modern interactive fiction game on itch.io.
- tomku 6y ago
  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 https://ifdb.tads.org [1]: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page [2]: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  There was one called Disco Elysium a couple years ago that made quite a few waves (but more graphical obviously)
- wwwwewwww 6y ago
  The games are still being made, and are very high quality. Once every few years I go to http://xyzzyawards.org http://xyzzyawards.org and play the winners.
germinalphrase 6y ago
Has anyone built a CYOA based on verbal input? Is there an available toolset with which to do so?
- pmiller2 6y ago
  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-2204883 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      This is an incredible game idea and you should absolutely make this because I want to play it!
      - bluGill 6y ago
        Great idea, but very hard to pull off. The hardware is easy, but all the wrting and plot needed to go from a demo to a fun game takes a lot of hard tedious work. I encourage the effort, but don't want to well it short. The idea is the easy part.
lolive 6y ago
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).
mwcremer 6y ago
Most of Infocom classics can be found at e.g. https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1
daniel5151 6y ago
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 https://github.com/DeMille/encrusted [2] https://github.com/daniel5151/embcrusted https://github.com/daniel5151/embcrusted
- simmons 6y ago
  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/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/
doggydogs94 6y ago
The old 1970s era Star Trek game is available on iOS; command line interface replaced with a few buttons. It is called Old Trek.
pugworthy 6y ago
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 https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure for the real deal.
- iainctduncan 6y ago
  True, but they really raised the bar with their parser!
- iainctduncan 6y ago
  the very first sentence says that Adventure was first.... :-/
krumpet 6y ago
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.
iainctduncan 6y ago
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. :-)
VadimPR 6y ago
If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them! (bias: I'm the project lead)
- aurelius12 6y ago
  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 https://ironrealms.com
  - Ciph 6y ago
    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 :-)
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    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.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  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.
  - pimlottc 6y ago
    Yeah, I also got heavily invested in tt++ scripts but never fully automated. It was great back in the day but there were definitely some eccentricities that made advanced difficult - lack of proper lists, awkwardness dealing with empty strings, weird scoping and special variables, no dicts. I recently dusted off my old files and tried to get it running in the latest version but there were so many breaking changes that I just gave up trying to fix it. It would be fun to try to make a proper fully automated bot, though as you said, there are so many different contexts and possible text prompts itd be difficult to make it truly reliable. I wonder what the best approach would be - some kind of classic AI goal system or newfangled ML? (If I had the time to start over, I’d probably use Mudlet since it uses a proper scripting (lua) instead of something that got hacked together over time. Though it’s a bit GUI-reliant for my tastes)
tibbydudeza 6y ago
Stationfall Planetfall A mind forever voyaging (still have it on my shelf) Classics.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I always found AMFV very underrated. Maybe I've never really been a puzzle person but I liked that one because it was more of an interactive story. Also really liked Planetfall. Those three (along with Hitchhiker's) were all written by a classmate of mine who I knew quite well.
sethammons 6y ago
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.
iainctduncan 6y ago
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!
not2b 6y ago
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.
markbnj 6y ago
I have Zork from Infocom in the original packaging with 5.25 floppies... wonder if it's worth anything?
- keyle 6y ago
  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.
  - markbnj 6y ago
    Yeah I doubt the disks can even be read anymore.
- mongol 6y ago
  Ebay has this for USD 80
easton_s 6y ago
"kill troll with sword" was my mavis beacon
dang 6y ago
If curious, from the archives: Zork source and binaries, January 1978 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371538 - Sept 2020 (13 comments) Zork source code, 1977 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108626 - May 2020 (81 comments) Exploring Zork (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731333 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19982345 - May 2019 (17 comments) A Brief History of Zork (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946781 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436 - April 2019 (238 comments) Z3 – The Zork CPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169565 - Sept 2017 (11 comments) The DUNGEON (Zork I) source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15147346 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138114 - Aug 2017 (32 comments) The Enduring Legacy of Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073227 - Aug 2017 (48 comments) Beyond Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524438 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705269 - June 2011 (133 comments) Others?
- raldi 6y ago
  The Data Structures Behind Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4564290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4564290 - Sept 2012 (0 comments)
SethMurphy 6y ago
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.
m463 6y ago
When I first played what is now called zork, it was called dungeon.
ChicagoDave 6y ago
Mainframe Zork aka Dungeon aka DUNGEO on the pdp-11 pretty much changed my life. I was a jock in high school until I found the math lab with two paper terminals and two geeks playing Adventure and Dungeon. It was literally like lightning hitting me. I spent nearly every waking hour on computers the rest of my time in high school and employed as a programmer by nineteen. It's been 36 years and I still write code, design/architect business systems, and enjoy the work.
getlawgdon 6y ago
What a wonderfully well-written piece. Kudos to the author.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

1977: Zork

280 points by fanf2 6y ago

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!

markus_zhang 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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...
ctdonath 6y ago
I reached the last chamber in Adventure. Never did figure out what to do next & last.
the_af 6y ago
And how could I forget! xyzzy
- psychstudio 6y ago
  So iconic in fact that it's the name of the annual IF awards AFAIR.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ci5er 6y ago
How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)
- ci5er 6y ago
  Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"
danielrpa 6y ago
I've recently played the entire Infocom text adventure catalog using walkthroughs. Yes, it feels somewhat like reading a book (although it's more "active" - hard to explain), but you get to experience a lot of what made the stories great. If you just want to finish Zork, I recommend this approach.

throwaway123x2 6y ago

Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?

tomku 6y ago
Twine: https://twinery.org https://twinery.org
- the_af 6y ago
  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.
- immigrantsheep 6y ago
  Inky as well https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
  - pimlottc 6y ago
    This is the engine behind the fantastic game 80 Days, for those who don’t know. Highly recommended.
- throwaway123x2 6y ago
  This looks great, thank you!
DonHopkins 6y ago
Logo Adventure: https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapin-logo-4c684a240b53 https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
ineptech 6y ago
"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_game.3F http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ#How_can_I_write_my_own_g...

sillyquiet 6y ago

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!

waltwalther 6y ago
Yes! Those hand drawn maps. Brings back memories..

narrator 6y ago

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.

crtasm 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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$.
  - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    Compuserve had a multi-player game called British Legends (also known as MUD 1) in the mid 80s. I very fondly remember paying $6.25 an hour to play at 300 baud. You can still play it here: https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/ https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/

JoeDaDude 6y ago

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 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 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twisty-little-passages

blackrock 6y ago

> 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?

lapetitejort 6y ago
Without first checking, I can confidently say you'll probably be able find a good modern interactive fiction game on itch.io.
tomku 6y ago
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 https://ifdb.tads.org [1]: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page [2]: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote
selimthegrim 6y ago
There was one called Disco Elysium a couple years ago that made quite a few waves (but more graphical obviously)
wwwwewwww 6y ago
The games are still being made, and are very high quality. Once every few years I go to http://xyzzyawards.org http://xyzzyawards.org and play the winners.

germinalphrase 6y ago

Has anyone built a CYOA based on verbal input? Is there an available toolset with which to do so?

pmiller2 6y ago
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-2204883 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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    This is an incredible game idea and you should absolutely make this because I want to play it!
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Great idea, but very hard to pull off. The hardware is easy, but all the wrting and plot needed to go from a demo to a fun game takes a lot of hard tedious work. I encourage the effort, but don't want to well it short. The idea is the easy part.

lolive 6y ago

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).

mwcremer 6y ago

Most of Infocom classics can be found at e.g. https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1 https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1

daniel5151 6y ago

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 https://github.com/DeMille/encrusted [2] https://github.com/daniel5151/embcrusted https://github.com/daniel5151/embcrusted

simmons 6y ago
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/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/

doggydogs94 6y ago

The old 1970s era Star Trek game is available on iOS; command line interface replaced with a few buttons. It is called Old Trek.

pugworthy 6y ago

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 https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure for the real deal.

iainctduncan 6y ago
True, but they really raised the bar with their parser!
iainctduncan 6y ago
the very first sentence says that Adventure was first.... :-/

krumpet 6y ago

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.

iainctduncan 6y ago

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. :-)

VadimPR 6y ago

If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them! (bias: I'm the project lead)

aurelius12 6y ago
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 https://ironrealms.com
- Ciph 6y ago
  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 :-)
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  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.
pmiller2 6y ago
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.
- pimlottc 6y ago
  Yeah, I also got heavily invested in tt++ scripts but never fully automated. It was great back in the day but there were definitely some eccentricities that made advanced difficult - lack of proper lists, awkwardness dealing with empty strings, weird scoping and special variables, no dicts. I recently dusted off my old files and tried to get it running in the latest version but there were so many breaking changes that I just gave up trying to fix it. It would be fun to try to make a proper fully automated bot, though as you said, there are so many different contexts and possible text prompts itd be difficult to make it truly reliable. I wonder what the best approach would be - some kind of classic AI goal system or newfangled ML? (If I had the time to start over, I’d probably use Mudlet since it uses a proper scripting (lua) instead of something that got hacked together over time. Though it’s a bit GUI-reliant for my tastes)

tibbydudeza 6y ago

Stationfall Planetfall A mind forever voyaging (still have it on my shelf) Classics.

ghaff 6y ago
I always found AMFV very underrated. Maybe I've never really been a puzzle person but I liked that one because it was more of an interactive story. Also really liked Planetfall. Those three (along with Hitchhiker's) were all written by a classmate of mine who I knew quite well.

sethammons 6y ago

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.

iainctduncan 6y ago

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!

not2b 6y ago

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.

markbnj 6y ago

I have Zork from Infocom in the original packaging with 5.25 floppies... wonder if it's worth anything?

keyle 6y ago
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.
- markbnj 6y ago
  Yeah I doubt the disks can even be read anymore.
mongol 6y ago
Ebay has this for USD 80

easton_s 6y ago

"kill troll with sword" was my mavis beacon

dang 6y ago

If curious, from the archives: Zork source and binaries, January 1978 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371538 - Sept 2020 (13 comments) Zork source code, 1977 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108626 - May 2020 (81 comments) Exploring Zork (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731333 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19982345 - May 2019 (17 comments) A Brief History of Zork (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946781 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436 - April 2019 (238 comments) Z3 – The Zork CPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169565 - Sept 2017 (11 comments) The DUNGEON (Zork I) source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15147346 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138114 - Aug 2017 (32 comments) The Enduring Legacy of Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073227 - Aug 2017 (48 comments) Beyond Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524438 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705269 - June 2011 (133 comments) Others?

raldi 6y ago
The Data Structures Behind Zork - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4564290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4564290 - Sept 2012 (0 comments)

SethMurphy 6y ago

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.

m463 6y ago

When I first played what is now called zork, it was called dungeon.

ChicagoDave 6y ago

Mainframe Zork aka Dungeon aka DUNGEO on the pdp-11 pretty much changed my life. I was a jock in high school until I found the math lab with two paper terminals and two geeks playing Adventure and Dungeon. It was literally like lightning hitting me. I spent nearly every waking hour on computers the rest of my time in high school and employed as a programmer by nineteen. It's been 36 years and I still write code, design/architect business systems, and enjoy the work.

getlawgdon 6y ago

What a wonderfully well-written piece. Kudos to the author.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]