ghost@bucsf.bu.edu (Jay Adelson) (06/30/91)
I recently discovered the public-domain version of Zork I-III for the amiga. This may be common knowledge to all of you, but it was news to me, that Dungeon, which was designed on a PDP-11 was the origin of Zork I-III, and that Dungeon in fact combines all three. Dungeon runs right out of my shell, quickly, with no questions asked. I've already discovered the limitations of the command parser, certain words are not understood. I've only played it for a few minutes really, but so far it seems the same as Zork in every way. (The directions are a bit off.) In any event, does anyone have any more information on this game? That is, the Dungeon version of it? What are the limitations of the command parser? And how much of Dungeon is in Zork I-III, and the vice versa? Thanks! -- """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" [ Jay Adelson | BIX: j.adelson ] [ T.G.C. ] [ ghost@bucsf.bu.edu | Channel One: ] [ 175 Newbury St. -Apt 3 Rear ] [ GEnie: J.ADELSON1 | Jay Adelson ] [ Boston, MA. 02116 ]
dfite@ringer.cs.utsa.edu (David W. Fite) (07/01/91)
In article <GHOST.91Jun30120026@bucsf.bu.edu> ghost@bucsf.bu.edu (Jay Adelson) writes: > >I recently discovered the public-domain version of Zork I-III for the amiga. >This may be common knowledge to all of you, but it was news to me, that >Dungeon, which was designed on a PDP-11 was the origin of Zork I-III, and >that Dungeon in fact combines all three. > > [...] > >In any event, does anyone have any more information on this game? That >is, the Dungeon version of it? What are the limitations of the command >parser? And how much of Dungeon is in Zork I-III, and the vice versa? > OK, this has been discussed recently on alt.folklore.computer, but those messages have most likely already been flushed from your site, so here is my recollections of an interesting bit of adventuring history. (And since this is more from how I learned the legends and only a little from the afc threads, I'll probably include a few minor errors. :) In the late 1960's, a bright lad named Will Crowther created a spelunker explorer game on a Xerox research machine. Another bright young lad named Donald Woods, found the game and talked to Crowther about spiffing the game up. The result was Adventure, the original text adventure. You may have heard of its locale, Collossal Cave. Naturally, being the early age of networking (thanks DARPA), many other fine young lads found the game. Many, many hours were lost in the wee hours with people from around the country being greeted by those most famous of opening lines: YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. (Gee, aren't Amiga's fun! I've got Adventure running right now, heh heh.) You can see the obvious influence that this game had on several young lads at M.I.T. as they created Dungeon which begins (firing up that game) You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. Anyway, they wrote a bigger, better version of Adventure, and instilled their own East Coast imprint on their work. (Crowther and Woods were Left Coasters.) A big advantage for the M.I.T. group was another group just down the hall from them, the AI lab. The knew the folks down there, and used parts of the natural language processor programs the AI group was working on for the amazing parser. (Of course, Dungeon's parser isn't close to Zork, but Zork came later. :) Dungeon was another big hit on the net, and when Apple ]['s were selling like hotcakes and Sierra On-Line games were moving right with them, the MIT lads (now graduated) decided to sell Dungeon for home computers. Unfortunately, home computers were definitely not the mainframes Dungeon was written for, so they had to break the game apart. That is why there are 3 Zorks, each a pretty clean cut piece from Dungeon, with a few extra bells and whistles thrown in (like the better parser). Also, a new language was created for writing Zork. The old language was MDL (usually pronounced muddle), but for the home computers they came up with ZIL (Zork Implementation Langauge). There is also a ZIL interpreter for each Infocom game, so porting the games is really not a problem. The rest, as they say, is history. Infocom became very successful, displacing On-Line as the big game producer. But text adventures fell out of favor to the more graphical adventures, Infocom's fortunes declined, until finally they were recently bought out by another company that plans to liquidate Infocom. Hope you enjoyed this little look at your electronic heritage. D.W. P.S. A few notes. Both Adventure and Dungeon are available for Amigas (on ab20, I believe) and they work fine on a 3000. Also, you might try GDT in Dungeon, it stands for Grand Debugging Tool. Unfortunately, I don't know the password for it, but if anyone finds out or knows, I'd appreciate a note my way. Also, I have an ASCII map of Dungeon that was posted on afc, that I'll post if enough people send email. (Don't waste bandwidth. :) -- dfite@ringer.cs.utsa.edu | The louder the track, APPLY YOUR FAVORITE DISCLAIMER | the better the hack.