Here's one clear "yes". Starting in 1979, Infocom developed the Z-machine for their text adventure games - a virtual machine which made it easier to port across

Here's one clear "yes". Starting in 1979, Infocom developed the Z-machine for their text adventure games - a virtual machine which made it easier to port across different microcomputers. During the 1980s, Infocom developers wrote games in ZIL, which was compiled to the Z-machine. In 1993 Graham Nelson released Inform, which compiled to the Z-machine. Quoting https://www.filfre.net/2019/11/new-tricks-for-an-old-z-machine-part-3-a-renaissance-is-nigh/ https://www.filfre.net/2019/11/new-tricks-for-an-old-z-machi... : > This event is considered by most of us who have seriously thought about the history of text adventures in the post-Infocom era to mark the first stirrings of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance, and with them the beginning of an interactive-fiction community that remains as artistically vibrant as ever today. ... > It wasn’t until some years after Inform had kick-started the Interactive Fiction Renaissance that enough ZIL code was recovered to give a reasonable basis for comparison. The answer, we now know, is that Inform resembles ZIL not at all in terms of syntax. Indeed, the two make for a fascinating case study in how different minds, working on the same problem and equipped with pretty much the same set of tools for doing so, can arrive at radically different solutions. ... > Having been designed when the gospel of object-oriented programming was still in its infancy, ZIL, while remarkable for embracing object-oriented principles to the extent it does, utilizes them in a slightly sketchy way, via pointers to functions which have to be defined elsewhere in the code. ... > The Inform standard library, by contrast, was full-featured, rigorous, and exacting by the time the language reached maturity — in many ways a more impressive achievement than the actual programming language which undergirded it. ... > Because it was coded so much more efficiently than Infocom’s ad-hoc efforts, this standard library allowed an Inform game to pack notably more content into a given number of kilobytes.