Oct 30th, 2020 - Category: Change
This famous quote should be familiar to anyone who played early computer games. It comes from one of the most famous classics from the 1980s, Zork. While Wikipedia has a good description of its history, I found this article from MentalFloss captured the spirit of the game much better. It’s hard to believe that a game without any graphics could have had such a major impact, but it did. So much so that I remember my first moments playing it on a mainframe in an office building in downtown Los Angeles. I had been hired by a friend’s parent to help with a data entry job and before we started she said, “I’ve got a quick errand to do, you might find this game interesting” and with those words she introduced my friend and me to the incredible world of Zork.
She returned all too soon and I typed for the rest of the day while dreaming about where I was going to explore the next time I played. The game was so simple, yet so compelling that it soon appeared on early home computers selling over a million copies. As you can see from the screenshots below, the descriptions of each location were short and the commands were rudimentary, mostly “North, South, East, West” and simple two to four word “verb noun” combinations.
Amazingly it is still available to play thanks to the tireless volunteers who have archived many classic games like this. The original computer source code is even archived. Even though there are no modern computers that can run the archaic language it was written in, it still provides a glimpse into programmers’ thinking back then. Here is an excerpt:
Eventually, after playing for weeks, I finished Zork and moved on to more and more complex adventure games, but it has always been the most memorable with places like the big white house, Flood Control Dam #3, and of course, Grues. The whole program was around 15,000 lines of code and less than 1 MB! By comparison, the Firefox web browser is over a million lines of code and a modern video game, Call of Duty, is 50 GB (Zork is actually an easter egg in Call of Duty, just type “Zork” to play it).
If you’d like to know more, here’s an article on its “inner workings.” In the meantime, give it a try, like a classic novel it has aged well.