Subject: Re: Zork/Dungeon (was Re: MDL)
From: [email-masked] (Charles Lasner)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Anthony Shipman) writes:
>>So now I'm confused.  What is the genealogy?
>
>Originally Dungeon was written in MDL.

Yes, and that version is the only true version with one game not split, good
parser, whole game, endgame, full features, and eventually 616 points.

>
>I played a version in the late 1970's that was a translation into Fortran.
>It was dated 18-JUN-78, and was distributed by DECUS. Compared to the MDL
>version it claimed to lack the endgame, have a simple parser, and have
>numerous bugs and spelling errors. It had 500 points.

Yes, that was the terrible version that appeared on VMS V 1.0, which was
still somewhat RSX-11 in drag.  Internally, it was a hacked-up version of
ADVENT attempting to interpret the "cave" of MDL ZORK.  Several revisions
appeared periodically of both MDL ZORK and this Fortran hacked-up version.

>
>In 1980 (I believe) a new version came out, this time with sources, that
>had the endgame, the egg, the Bank of Zork, and the Puzzle Room added.
>Maximum score was now 585 points. The game was then renamed Zork.

No, Zork is the original name of the -10/20 version.  If you use the
"zork" command in any version, it responds with "at your service" shades of
PDP-10 AID. (eh?)

That very-much-improved Fortran version was slightly incompatible with the
MDL ZORK version in small ways (room directions off a little in spots) but
the disparity was much smaller.

Also, it's an announcement for the Infocom games to follow, and it's from
Infocom, not DEC, although Bob Supnik is clearly connected with the older
and this version; he was a DEC employee back then, and also now a manager
of Alpha.

>
>Infocom was apparently formed about this time to distribute commercially
>to the fledgling home computer market. I had CP/M versions of their games,
>for instance.

And at this time, "locking the barn after the horse was stolen" MIT copyrighted
the MDL ZORK version (c) 1980 MIT.

>
>They rewrote the games (again) to use a small compact interpreter and a
>database. (The Fortran is Spaghetti code). This made the program so it
>would run on machines with little memory (PDP/11's, 8080's...) since the
>database would be loaded as necessary from the (floppy) disk. The floppy
>disk capacity on these systems was not great enough to put the entire game,
>therefore they had to split it into three parts -- ZORK I, ZORK II, and
>ZORK III. (IMHO, it probably would have fit into two games, but because it
>doesn't really divide up well, they had to add to II and III to make them
>stand on their own).

Probably still has problems from its roots in being ADVENT Fortran code.

>
>This new C port, is the 1980 Fortran version brute force converted to
>C with a conversion program (this according to its documentation). Looking
>at the code bears this out -- it is terrible C code, full of gotos! Quite
>naturally it is the same as the old version.
>
>-- 
>Tom Almy
>[email-masked]
>Standard Disclaimers Apply

cjl

From: [email-masked] (Stu Galley)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Zork/Dungeon (LONG)

from THE NEW ZORK TIMES Vol. 4 Nr. 1 - WINTER 1985
Copyright (c) Infocom, Inc. --- transcribed without permission

The History of Zork -- First in a Series

by Tim Anderson

In the beginning, back in the 1960's, DEC (Digital Equipment
Corporation) created the PDP-10, a medium-sized computer.  The "10",
as it was called, became popular at many research installations, and a
great deal of software was written for it, some of which is still far
in advance of systems on more modern machines.  At MIT's Artificial
Intelligence Lab, an operating system called ITS (Incompatible
Time-sharing System) was written for the 10.  ITS was designed to make
software development easy.  The designers of the system assumed that
it would have a small, knowledgeable, friendly group of users, so they
did not include any security features.

Around 1970, the ARPAnet was invented.  ARPAnet made it possible for
researchers all over the country (indeed, all over the world) to
communicate with each other, and to use each other's machines.  In
those halcyon days, access was unrestricted; you could get on from any
machine connected to the net, or by knowing an appropriate phone
number.  Budding hackers from around the country soon discovered that
this made a wonderful playground.  They also discovered that there
were some computers at MIT with some neat stuff on them and no
security -- anyone who could connect to the machines could log in.

Also around 1970, a language called MUDDLE (later renamed MDL) was
developed as a successor to LISP.  It never succeeded in fully
replacing LISP, but it developed a loyal user community of its own,
primarily at MIT's Project MAC (now called the Laboratory for Computer
Science) and especially in the Dynamic Modelling Group (later the
Programming Technology Division).  The Dynamic Modelling Group (DM),
in addition to its other accomplishments, was responsible for some
famous games.  The first of these was a multi-player graphics game
called Maze, in which players wandered around a maze shooting each
other.  Each user's screen showed the view of the maze that his or her
computerized alter-ego saw, updated in real time.  Dave Lebling was
among those chiefly responsible (to blame?) for the existence of the
game.

The next game of note was Trivia (who says research labs aren't ahead
of their time?), an ongoing "can you top this" contest for the truly
crazed.  Trivia, unlike Maze, could be played by network users, and
achieved wide popularity on the ARPAnet.  Marc Blank wrote the second
version, and I maintained/hacked it; it was actually a legitimate test
of a database system the group used for a research project.

ln early 1977, Adventure swept the ARPAnet.  Willie Crowther was the
original author, but Don Woods greatly expanded the game and unleashed
it on an unsuspecting network.  When Adventure arrived at MIT, the
reaction was typical: after everybody spent a lot of time doing
nothing but solving the game (it's estimated that Adventure set the
entire computer industry back two weeks), the true lunatics began to
think about how they could do it better.  Adventure was written in
FORTRAN, after all, so it couldn't be very smart.  It accepted only
two-word commands, it was obviously hard to change, and the problems
were sometimes not everything one could desire.  (I was present when
Bruce Daniels, one of the DM'ers, figured out how to get the last
point in Adventure by examining the game with a machine-language
debugger.  There was no other way to do it.)

By late May, Adventure had been solved, and various DM'ers were
looking for ways to have fun.  Marc Blank was enjoying a respite from
medical school; I had just finished my master's degree; Bruce Daniels
was getting bored with his Ph.D. topic; and Dave Lebling was heartily
sick of Morse code.  Dave wrote (in MUDDLE) a command parser that was
almost as smart as Adventure's; Marc and I, who were both in the habit
of hacking all night, took advantage of this to write a prototype
four-room game.  It has long since vanished.  There was a band, a
bandbox, a peanut room (the band was outside the door, playing "Hail
to the Chief"), and a "chamber filled with deadlines."  Dave played and
tested the game, saw that it was pretty awful, and left, to spend two
weeks basking in the sun.

Marc, Bruce, and I sat down to write a real game.  We began by drawing
some maps, inventing some problems, and arguing a lot about how to
make things work.  Bruce still had some thoughts of graduating, thus
preferring design to implementation, so Marc and I spent the rest of
Dave's vacation in the terminal room implementing the first version of
Zork.  Zork, by the way, was never really named.  "Zork" was a nonsense
word floating around; it was usually a verb, as in "zork the fweep,"
and may have been derived from "zorch."  ("Zorch" is another nonsense
word implying total destruction.)  We tended to name our programs with
the word "zork" until they were ready to be installed on the system.

By the time Dave got back, there was a (more-or-less) working game.  It
probably wasn't as big as Adventure, and was certainly less than half
the size of the final version, but it had the thief, the cyclops, the
troll, the reservoir and dam, the house, part of the forest, the
glacier, the maze, and a bunch of other stuff.  The problems were not
as interesting as those that came later: it took time for people to
learn how to write good problems, and the early parsers wouldn't
support complicated solutions anyway.  What we had done right was all
in the "substratum."  There was a well-defined (and easily-changed)
theory governing interactions among objects, verbs, and rooms.  It was
easy to drop in new parsers, which happened frequently, since everyone
and his uncle tried his hand at writing a parser (Marc finally became
obsessed with it, and wrote the last 40 or 50 of them himself).  And it
was easy to add new rooms, objects, and creatures (I won't discuss the
difficulty of adding new concepts yet).

Zork, like Adventure, survived only because it was played by people
outside the small community that developed it.  In the case of
Adventure, this was possible because it was written in FORTRAN and
could run on practically any machine.  Zork was written in MUDDLE,
which ran on only some PDP-10s.  Its user community was the group of
"net randoms" that infested the MIT systems; remember that we had no
security at all at this time.  DM had developed an active community
largely because of Trivia.  Since Trivia was pretty dead by the time
Zork came along, there weren't many other things for the randoms to
do, so they hung around waiting for the next game.  Early players of
Zork ranged from John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP (we actually have
a copy of the connectivity matrix that McCarthy used instead of a
map), to twelve-year-olds from Northern Virginia.  No one ever
officially announced Zork: people would log in to DM, see that someone
was running a program named Zork, and get interested.  They would then
"snoop" on the console of the person running Zork, and see that it was
an Adventure-like game.  From there, it only took a little more effort
to find out how to start it up.  For a long time, the magic incantation
was ":MARC;ZORK"; people who had never heard of ITS, DM, or PDP-10s
somehow heard that if they got to something called "host 70" on the
ARPAnet, logged in, and typed the magic word, they could play a game.

Although Zork in June 1977 was infinitely more primitive than, say,
Zork I, it still had pretty much the same flavor.  The Flathead family
was represented, in the person of Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive,
ruler of the Great Underground Empire; and the official currency was
the zorkmid.  Bruce was responsible for the purplish prose where these
were first mentioned.

Many of the details of the GUE were whimsical (if not silly), but we
weren't completely immune to reality.  In those days, if one wandered
around in the dark area of the dungeon, one fell into a bottomless
pit.  Many users pointed out that a bottomless pit in an attic should
be noticeable from the ground floor of the house.  Dave came up with
the notion of grues, and he wrote their description.  From the
beginning (or almost the beginning, anyway), the living room had a
copy of "US News & Dungeon Report," describing recent changes in the
game.  All changes were credited to some group of implementers, but
not necessarily to those actually responsible: one of the issues
describe Bruce working for weeks to fill in all the bottomless pits
in the dungeon, thus forcing packs of grues to roam around.

The first major addition to the game, done in June 1977, was the river
section, designed and implemented by Marc.  It survives largely
unchanged in Zork I, but illustrates very well the problems of
building reality.  There were minor problems of consistency -- some
parts of the river were sunlit (and even reachable from outside), but
others were dark.  The major problem resulted from the new concept
Marc introduced: vehicles.  In the original game, there were rooms,
objects, and a player; the player always existed in some room.
Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms.  This
required changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs,
objects, and rooms (we had to have some way of making "walk" do
something reasonable when the player was in the boat).  In addition,
ever-resourceful Zorkers tried to use the boat anywhere they thought
they could.  The code for the boat itself was not designed to function
outside the river section, but nothing kept the player from carrying
the deflated boat to the reservoir and trying to sail across.
Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but the general
problem always remained: anything that changes the world you're
modelling changes practically everything in the world you're
modelling.

Although Zork was only a month old, it could already surprise its
authors.  The boat, due to the details of its implementation, turned
into a "bag of holding": players could put practically anything into
it and carry it around, even if the weight of the contents far
exceeded what a player was allowed to carry.  The boat was two
separate objects: the "inflated boat" object contained the objects,
but the player carried the "deflated boat" object around.  We knew
nothing about this: someone finally reported it to us as a bug.  As
far as I know, the bug is still there.

from THE NEW ZORK TIMES Vol. 4 Nr. 2 - SPRING 1985
Copyright (c) Infocom, Inc. --- transcribed without permission

The History of Zork -- SECOND IN A SERIES

by Tim Anderson

When last seen, Zork(R) was a small game (probably slightly more than
half the size of the final mainframe version) that ran on one
computer.  Although it was only six weeks old, and had never been
advertised, it had a relatively large user community from all over the
country.  In some ways it was better than the classic Adventure at this
time, but mostly it was the next game to come along, and it wasn't
even the only contender.

The characters: MIT-DM, a PDP-10 running ITS; MDL (aka Muddle), a
language that ran only on PDP-10s; Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave
Lebling, and Tim Anderson, intrepid implementers; and assorted net
randoms.

July 1977 saw two major additions to the game, the last for several
months (we weren't exactly hired to write the thing, after all).  The
first of these was another BKD special: Bruce didn't write much code,
but he was willing to design problems.  We went to him, and asked for
a particularly nasty section; the result was the coal mine.  His design
was originally nastier than the final implementation, since the maze
was just about as horrible as the original one in the game; it got
simplified due to popular demand.  The problems were improving in
quality, and the coal mine maze was a late example of making things
hard by making them tedious.

The volcano section was Marc's second vehicle implementation, but is
perhaps more noteworthy for the loving portraits of Lord Dimwit
Flathead the Excessive that decorated the coin and stamp found in the
section.  The river (see Part I) and volcano sections, in addition to
vehicles, required a better concept of time: both the boat and the
balloon moved more or less on their own, and the volcano required the
use of explosives and fuses.  Marc added a clock daemon, which
processed a queue of events that would happen some fixed number of
moves later.  This handled, in addition to the movement of the
vehicles, the fuse, the lantern burning out, and the mysterious gnomes
that occasionally appear.  The first of these was in the volcano: if
the player got trapped in the upper reaches of the volcano by losing
his balloon, after a few moves a volcano gnome would appear and offer
freedom in exchange for a treasure.  We were just being nice; most
players weren't allowed to save their games, so they had no way of
backing out if they made such a mistake.  The gnome allowed them to
keep playing, albeit with no chance of getting all the points.

Even before the volcano section, we'd talked about a problem that
involved flying; Dave had a preference for something with an eagle,
and its aerie, but we could never figure out how to restrict things
enough -- it wouldn't do to have a parallel map of the game viewed
from the air.  Once again, we worried about restraining a new concept,
so the balloon had no way of leaving the volcano.  And once again we
were bitten by a new concept.  When the player used the explosives in
the wrong place, and didn't get out of the way, he'd end up with
20,000 pounds (or was it tons?) of rock on his head.  This made a
certain amount of sense in the underground section, but not out in the
forest.

No more sections were added to the game for several months after July,
but it continued to improve.  In addition it finally moved to machines
other than DM, thus greatly expanding the number of players.

Although Muddle ran primarily on DM, a version for TENEX (the most
popular PDP-10 operating system on the Arpanet) had existed for some
time; the TENEX version could, with some minor modifications, run on
TOPS-20 as well.  We finally succumbed to one of the requests for a
copy of Zork when we were given an account on a TOPS-20 machine on the
net.  After we made the necessary software modifications, of course,
many copies could be made; a mailing list of Zork owners developed, so
They could get whatever updates appeared.

Although people could get runnable Zorks, they couldn't get sources.
We tried two approaches to protecting the sources (remember, there was
no protection of any sort on DM): they were normally kept encrypted;
and we patched the system to protect the directory where we kept the
sources (named CFS, for either "Charles F. Stanley" or "Computer
Fantasy and Simulation").  This worked pretty well, but was finally
beaten by a system hacker from Digital: using some archaic ITS
documentation (there's never been any other kind), he was able to
figure out how to modify the running operating system.  Being clever,
he was also able to figure out how our patch to protect the source
directory worked.  Then it was just a matter of decrypting the sources,
but that was soon reduced to figuring out the key we'd used.  Ted had
no trouble getting machine time; he just found a new TOPS-20 machine
that was undergoing final testing, and started a program that tried
every key until it got something that looked like text.  After less
than a day of crunching, he had a readable copy of the source.  We had
to concede that anyone who'd go to that much trouble deserved it.  This
led to some other things later on.

Players hadn't been able to save their Zorks because the method we
used at first took several hundred thousand bytes for each save, and
even on a time-shared system that was excessive.  Marc, around this
time, invented a new way of saving that cut the size down to
something more reasonable, with the slight disadvantages that any new
rooms or objects added to the old game would break existing save
files, and that it never quite worked right anyway.  However, it did
make it easier to play the game, and we still had the silly notion of
being nice to our users.

Fall '77 saw two major additions to the game, as Marc took another
break from medical school (yes, fans, he did graduate on time), and
Dave got into coding in a big way.  The Alice in Wonderland section,
complete with its magic bucket and robot, was installed.  The robot was
the first "actor," an object that could perform some of the same tasks
the player could.  The style of address was familiar: "ROBOT, TAKE THE
CAKE."  The implementation of this required another change in the
game's flow of control, and changes to anything else that one could
reasonably talk to.

The first version of fighting was added about the same time.  Dave, an
old Dungeons and Dragons player, didn't like the completely
predictable ways of killing creatures off.  In the original game, for
example, one killed a troll by throwing a knife at him; he would catch
the knife and gleefully eat it (like anything else you threw at him),
but hemorrhage as a result.  Dave added basically the full complexity
of DD-style fighting, with different strengths for different weapons,
wounds, unconsciousness, and death.  Each creature had its own set of
messages, so a fight with the thief (who uses a stiletto) would be
very different from a fight with the troll and his axe.

As a result of the purloined sources at DEC, a lunatic there decided
to translate Zork into FORTRAN.  We had always assumed this would be
impossible: Muddle is very (oops, *very*) different from FORTRAN, and
much more complicated, and we'd used most of its features in designing
Zork.  The guy who did it was mostly a hardware person, so perhaps he
didn't know what he was up against.  At any rate, shortly after the
Great Blizzard of '78 he had a working version, initially for PDP-11s.
Since it was in FORTRAN, it could run on practically anything, and by
now it has.

Unfortunately, at some point in the preceding year we (no one will now
admit to suggesting the idea) had decided to change the name of the
game.  Zork was too much of a nonsense word, not descriptive of the
game, etc., etc., etc.  Silly as it sounds, we eventually started
calling it Dungeon.  (Dave admits to suggesting the new name, but
that's only a minor sin.) When Bob the lunatic released his FORTRAN
version to the DEC users' group, that was the name he used.  I'm sure
many people have noticed a curious similarity between the Dungeon game
they played on their friendly IBM 4341 and the Zork I they played on
their equally friendly IBM PC; now you know why.

Fortunately for us, a certain company (which shall remain nameless)
decided to claim that it had trademark rights to the name Dungeon, as
a result of certain games that it sold.  We didn't agree (and MIT had
some very expensive lawyers on retainer who agreed with us), but it
encouraged us to do the right thing, and not hide our "Zorks" under a
bushel.

The next section that was added was intended to be the last: after a
player had accumulated all the points in the game, he could play the
End Game, designed largely by Dave.  This became the section of Zork II
with the Dungeon Master, and at the time was certainly the most
involved, and hardest (as it should have been) thing in the game.  The
implementation was, if anything, more involved than the problem.  Less
than two months later, though, Marc had come up with something worse,
probably during a boring anatomy lecture.  The bank section has
probably been fully deciphered by fewer people than anything else in
the game; even those who solve it on their own don't usually
understand what was going on.  I can only say that it makes sense if
you understand it.

For some time, we'd been getting bug reports, fan mail, and
suggestions for new problems from all sorts of people.  We were
beginning to run a little short on ideas anyway, and one of the ideas
we got was very good.  During a lengthy dinner at Roy's, our favorite
Chinese restaurant, we worked out the details of the jewel-encrusted
egg, purple prose courtesy of Dave.  Many people on the net had long
since solved the game, but went back in and did any new problems that
came along; one of them had played DD with Dave, and called him up
about a day after the egg was announced.  "I've gotten the egg opened,
but I assume you losers have some nonsense where you do something with
the canary and the songbird.  Dave, no fool, said "Cough, cough, ahem,
of course," and immediately went off and added the brass bauble.

The remaining puzzles, the Royal Zork Puzzle Museum and the palantirs,
were added in the late summer and fall of 1978.  The puzzle was
designed (several times) primarily by Bruce, who in theory was back
trying to finish his dissertation.  Finding the minimum number of moves
required to solve it was a popular pastime among dedicated Zorkers for
a while.

The last (lousy) point was a tribute to the final point in the
original Adventure, which involved leaving a particular object in a
particular room for no particular reason.  When we first solved
Adventure in 1977, Bruce finally figured this out by using a
machine-language debugger on the running game (since Adventure was not
written in machine language, this was not easy).  The major difference
between that and our version (a stamp worth One Lousy point) is that
it would be harder to find ours without the source of the game.

The last puzzle was added in February of '79.  We (mainly I, at this
point) kept fixing bugs for almost two more years -- the last
mainframe update was created in January of '81.  No new puzzles were
added because none of the implementers had time or inclination, and
because we had no more space available: at the time, we were limited
to a megabyte of memory, and we had used it all up.  The first article
about Zork appeared in April of '79, and attracted a great deal of
interest; some of this may have been because we offered to give people
the game (if they didn't already have it), and gave them parts of the
sacred sources as well.

Infocom was incorporated in 1979 by various people from the DM group,
including Marc, Dave, and me.  It was not founded to sell Zork; rather,
it was founded to give group members somewhere to go from MIT.  Marc
and Joel Berez (both exiled to Pittsburgh) determined that it would be
possible to make Zork run on something cheaper than the $400,000
PDP-10, and the company eventually went along.  See the next NZT for
further details.

In the meantime, we still get requests for hints on the mainframe Zork
(sometimes it's called Dungeon, and often it's on something other than
a PDP-10).  The most recent request for a copy came in on April 1, but
I think it was serious.

[end]

From: [email-masked] (Stu Galley)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Zork/Dungeon (LONG)

THE NEW ZORK TIMES - SUMMER 1985 - Vol. 4 Nr. 3
(c) 1985 Infocom, Inc.

The History of Zork -- The Final (?) Chapter: MIT, MDL, ZIL, ZIP

by Stu Galley
Special To The New Zork Times

The year: 1979.  As Tim Anderson has recounted in previous
installments in this series, Zork was one large computer game, about a
megabyte in size -- as large as it could be and still fit in its
original home, a DECsystem-10.  Marc Blank and Dave Lebling designed
and wrote the program, with the help of Bruce Daniels and Tim.  They
had met and worked together in a research group at M.I.T., and now the
group was losing valuable talent through graduation and the lure of
"the real world."  Several members of the group believed that they
could still produce outstanding computer-based products in almost any
category -- from programming languages like MDL (an important
influence on modern Lisp) to data bases, electronic mail and
artificially intelligent systems -- if only centrifugal force didn't
separate them.

The problem: What sort of product could the group work on together,
and to whom could they sell it?  As early as 1976, they had discussed
the potential marketability of various computer games that had been
designed or implemented by group members just for fun.  Now their
attention was focused on various potential products based on
mini-computers, some involving custom hardware as well as software.
The group was ignoring the potential of a mass market for
micro-computers, not only from lack of experience with them (the
group's unofficial motto is "We hate micros!") but also from serious
concerns about software piracy.

Joel Berez had graduated from the group and was working in his
family's business in Pittsburgh.  Marc had finished medical school
(and moonlighting on Zork development) and was starting his medical
residency in Pittsburgh.  These two had long been friends, and they
liked getting together for a Chinese dinner and conversation.

One topic of conversation was "the good old days" at M.I.T., and one
reason that the old days were good was Zork.  They wished that Zork's
wonderfulness (or "taste and winnage" in M.I.T. jargon) could somehow
be brought to more people.  But very few people had access to the
large computers that could run Zork.  More and more people were
beginning to buy personal computers -- like the Radio Shack TRS-80
Model I or the Apple II -- but those computers were too small to run
Zork.  Or were they?

Joel and Marc began some seat-of-the-pants design work (much of it on
Joel's parents' coffee table) on how much Zork could be compressed,
and how to do so in a flexible way to allow for different,
incompatible personal computers in the future.  They considered using
available "portable" tools for programming, like UCSD Pascal, but it
soon became clear that Zork had too much text in it.  (Keep in mind
that a standard personal computer at this time came with 16K bytes of
memory and no disk drive.)  They finally concluded that, by inventing
a programming system specifically for Zork, they could fit about half
of it into a computer with 32K bytes of memory and one floppy-disk
drive.

Meanwhile, the group at M.I.T. was in the process of forming a
corporation -- choosing "Infocom" as the name least offensive to
everyone -- and searching for a project that would quickly produce a
product to start generating income for the company.  Among the
projects they considered were systems for keeping track of documents,
handling electronic correspondence, and processing text.  When Zork
was added to the list of possibilities, Joel and Marc worked
intensively during the summer and autumn creating the programming
tools for their design.  And they had to work for IOUs, since the
company treasury -- which started with only $11,500 -- could afford to
pay only for the hardware they needed at the time.

The key to their design was an imaginary computer chip called the
"Z-machine." This chip would be able to run Zork (or at least part of
it) if the program were coded in a special, very compact language.
Then the design called for each personal computer to have a program
(called a Z-machine Interpreter Program or ZIP) that would interpret
the special Z-machine language and make the computer act the same way
that a real Z-machine would.  In order to get Zork written in this
special language, another language was invented, called Zork
Implementation Language (ZIL), similar in many ways to MDL.  Marc
built a two-stage translator program that would translate a ZIL
program, first into an assembly language and then further into the
Z-machine language.  He also built a ZIP so that a DECsystem-20 could
emulate the Z-machine.

There was still the problem of cutting Zork in half.  Dave examined
his complete map of Zork and drew a boundary around a portion that
included about 100 or so locations: everything "above ground" and a
large section surrounding the Round Room.  The object was to create a
smaller Zork that would fit within the constraints established by the
design of Joel and Marc.  Whatever wouldn't fit was to be saved for
another game, another day.

In the process of being converted from MDL into ZIL, the program
became "cleaner" and friendlier. The geographies of the maze and the
coal mine were simplified so that the connections were less arbitrary,
and in other places complexity was removed whenever it didn't serve a
justifiable purpose.  For example, there was originally a barrel
sitting near the top of Aragain Falls, but it was just a red herring;
its only purpose was to lure unsuspecting adventurers inside and carry
them over the falls to destruction.  The Rainbow Room had its name
changed to On the Rainbow, and that meant removing the silly joke
about Rockefeller Center and the NBC Commissary.  Since the Land of
the (Living) Dead (the word "Living" was removed in order to fit the
name on the status line) no longer led to the stairway where Zork III
later began, the crystal skull (a brand-new treasure) was put there
instead.

By late 1979, Joel and Marc had both moved back to Boston.  Joel had
been elected president of Infocom and started business school, and
Zork I was shaping up as lnfocom's first product.  Zork I first saw
the light of day on a DECsystem-20 on which the company was renting
time, then on the PDP-11 in Joel's bedroom.  Scott Cutler (who had
graduated from the group a couple of years before) used his TRS-80
Model II to create a ZIP for a TRS-80 Model I.  As 1980 dawned,
Infocom spent a large portion of its bank account to purchase a Model
I, and Scott and Marc demonstrated that Zork I was alive in it by
starting the game and actually collecting points with the incantation
"N.E.OPEN.IN." (It's certainly no less inspiring than "Come here, Mr.
Watson; I want you!")

Mike Dornbrook was enlisted to test Zork I for bugs and other bad
features, because he had some experience with computers but no
experience with the original Zork, exactly like our intended audience.
(One of his contributions was the alternate -- and, some say, more
logical -- solution to the Loud Room puzzle, which was added only
after the first users of Zork I asked so often for hints for that
puzzle.)  He played it so much that he memorized the entire geography,
and he fell in love with the game.  He was convinced that it would
attract a cult following, although others thought it would last maybe
a year on the market and then fade away, like a video game.  He urged
the company to start planning spin-off products, like maps, hints,
posters, T-shirts, etc.  So the first published release of Zork I had
another feature added, a "small piece of paper" in the artist's studio
that said something like "Write to Infocom, P.O. Box 120, Cambridge,
Mass. 02142 for info on other products, including Movement Assistance
Planners (M.A.P.s) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure
Seekers (H.I.N.T.S.)." Besides leaving the door open for an
after-market in Zork accessories, we wanted to start building a mailing
list of customers for future direct mailings (like the one you are
reading!).

Now that the company had a flesh-and-blood product, how could a small
group of hackers market and sell it?  One possibility was to produce it
ourselves and distribute it through computer chain stores.  But that
meant devoting time and energy to finding suppliers, producing
packages, supporting users, and so on.  Another possibility was to
contract with a software publisher, but which one?  Joel contacted
Microsoft, but they were already publishing the original "Colossal
Cave" adventure game -- the one that inspired Zork -- and by the time
Zork fan Bill Gates heard of our offer, Infocom was deep in
negotiations with Personal Software Inc. (PS).

PS had several good features: it was the first true publisher of
software developed by others; it was the leading publisher of computer
games at the time; and it had strong ties to Software Arts Inc., where
VisiCalc was invented (_requiescant_in_pace_), and where Zork I was
demonstrated in February 1980.  PS agreed in June to publish Zork I
and sent us an advance on royalties, our first bonafide income!  Sales
began in December, and over the next nine months PS sold about 1500
copies of the TRS-80 version. *

Also in June, we paid for a search of trademark records in preparation
for registering "Zork" as our own trademark.  We discovered that
Mattel Inc. had registered "Mighty Zork" in 1973 for a toy model
motorcycle, but that registration was cancelled in October 1979.
Other trademarks discovered in the search were the likes of Zorr,
Zorak, Zark, and Zowees (all by Mattel); Zogg, Zon, Zak, Zok, Zot,
Zonk, and Zerak; and variations on Mork and Ork (by Paramount
Pictures).  Not to mention the Zork Hardware Company of El Paso and
Albuquerque.

We had another product in which PS had no interest: the PDP-11 version
of Zork I.  We sent product announcements to various places, including
a newsletter for PDP-11 users, and as a result, the first copy of Zork
I sold was a PDP-11 version!  It came on an eight-inch floppy disk
with a manual that I wrote and Joel had reproduced from a typewritten
master.

By the end of 1980, the version of ZIP for the Apple II had been
created by Bruce, who had designed puzzles for the original Zork
before graduating from M.I.T. and going to work for Apple Computer
Inc.  Apple Zork I proved more popular than the TRS-80 version; PS
sold over 6000 copies in eight months.

The first press reviews of Zork I were encouraging.  In February 1981,
BYTE magazine said, "No single advance in the science of Adventure has
been as bold and exciting as the introduction of Personal Software
lnc.'s _Zork,_The_Great_Underground_Empire._ . . . That the program is
entertaining, eloquent, witty, and precisely written is almost beside
the point. Unlike the kingdoms of the Adventures for machines with 16K
bytes of memory and far from the classic counter-earthiness of the
Colossal Cave in the original Adventure, Zork can be felt and touched
-- experienced, if you will -- through the care and attention to
detail the authors have rendered. . . . [A] most excellent and
memorable work of computerized fiction."

Mike Dornbrook was enlisted again to fulfill mail orders for
personalized hints.  Joel collected orders from the post office box,
passed orders for maps and posters to his Significant Other for
fulfillment, gave requests for hints to Mike, and gave me the numerous
small checks to deposit in the bank.  Mike created personalized hints
off the top of his head, typing them on an old office typewriter.
(When Mike started business school in September 1981, he founded a
separate company, the Zork User's Group, and took over all mail-order
sales.  Only then did he computerize the operation.  In 1983, Mike
came back to work for Infocom, bringing Z.U.G. with him.)

Meanwhile, Dave was designing Zork II. At first, the most
straightforward approach seemed to be to use everything left out of
Zork I and simply convert it from MDL to ZIL.  But Dave's active
imagination kept inventing new puzzles that virtually begged to be
implemented.  So the final design left out the Royal Puzzle and the
"end-game" (both to appear in Zork III) and instead included the
Wizard of Frobozz, the garden, and the new diamond maze.  (The last
was re-oriented to the compass based on Mike's belief that "southpaw"
should be a hint.)  The last of the original puzzles -- the long slide
and "sending for the brochure" -- were left out of Zork III and didn't
reappear until Sorcerer.

Zork II was offered to PS in April and licensed in June 1981, about
the same time that Joel graduated and became Infocom's first salaried
employee.  But we had serious concerns about PS's commitment, even to
Zork I.  After an initial rush of advertising, Zork I seemed to join
PS's range of products as just another game.  We were eager to make
new versions and new titles -- including Zork III, "Zork: the Mystery"
(Deadline), and "Zorks in Space" (Starcross) -- but not if our
publisher wasn't also eager.  The fact was that PS was planning to
drop its line of entertainment software -- since their titles neither
sold well over the long term nor brought in enough money to satisfy
them -- and to change its name to Visicorp in order to identify
closely with its "Visi-" series of business products. **

It now appeared that we had two choices: to negotiate and contract
with another publisher (and to hope for more satisfaction), or to take
the plunge and _become_ a publisher.  We definitely preferred the
second choice, but that required office space, production facilities,
an advertising agency, and so on -- and most of all, money.  But we
threw caution to the wind, and hired Mort Rosenthal (who later founded
Corporate Software Inc.) as marketing manager, who found a time-shared
office in Boston's venerable Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a time-shared
production plant in Randolph, an ad agency in Watertown, an
order-taking service in New Jersey, a supplier of disks in California,
and so on.  The money came both from the company's founders and from a
bank loan that they personally guaranteed.

We announced Zork II and our new role as publisher with a Christmas
promotion as eye-catching as we could afford.  Thanks to our ad
agency, we had a new style of packaging for both Zorks (the
stone-built letters that are still in use), a counter display for
stores, ads in major computer magazines, and direct-mail ads for
dealers.  We also bought PS's entire inventory of Zork I (except the
TRS-80 version, which they still wanted to sell) to prevent them from
"dumping" it on the market at bargain prices and lowering the public's
image of "Zork" in general.  Our first shipment went out just in time
for Christmas sales.

On New Year's Day 1982, we moved the company to larger space at the
far end of Cambridge -- 55 Wheeler Street.  Now we had office space
for everyone, especially for Marc (now vice-president for product
development) to finish Zork III.  And we had enough space to set up
all the personal computers -- instead of shuffling them from one
person's home to another -- for testers to use, and for programmers to
create or adapt ZIPs for Atari, CP/M, IBM PC, and other machines.
Zork III was finished in the autumn, about the same time that the
company began hiring people to begin developing its first business
product.  But that's another story.

* Zork I came under the wing of PS's New Products Manager, a fellow
named Mitch Kapor, who later founded Lotus Development Corp.

** In December 1984, after a long legal tangle with Software Arts over
VisiCalc, Visicorp eventually merged into one of its own spin-off
companies and disappeared.

[end]

From: [email-masked] (Dave Lebling)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: xyzzy
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 19:50:19 GMT

>[email-masked] (Jason A. Wells) writes:
>>	To my knowledge, when Zork was first released, Infocom boasted
>>that their command handling, complex puzzles, and such could not be
>>handled in FORTRAN.

Infocom never said such a thing.  In fact, the gentleman who
translated Zork into FORTRAN had already done so before Infocom
existed, and with the (post-hoc) approval of the Zork authors.

>>  Which caused DECUS (DEC Users Society) develop Dungeon
>>to prove Infocom wrong.

I think he did it so he could play Zork on his PDP-11.  It wasn't
given to DECUS until much later, when he got tired of people calling
him up asking for it.

>>  DECUS apparently did a nice job (never played it,
>>myself) however Dungeon is said to fall short in its command handling.

That's true.  The Dungeon parser was never quite as good as the
original.  This was primarily, as I recall, because the translator was
using a version of FORTRAN for PDP-11s that didn't support really
large executables.  He used some unholy number of overlays to get it
to work as it was.

>Yes and no. True, the Fortran version of Zork (a.k.a. Dungeon) was
>written after Infocom published the split up Zork trilogy for micros,

No.  See above.

> [snip]
> I'm not sure when the unsplit version of "Zork" was renamed
>"Dungeon" -- at the time of the FORTRAN conversion?

Zork was renamed Dungeon by the authors, and then re-renamed Zork.
The FORTRAN effort started during the (brief) period when the game was
called Dungeon, and the name stuck to that version.

	Dave Lebling
	(Original Implementor(tm))
	[email-masked]

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction,comp.unix.bsd.misc
From: [email-masked] (Frank Durda IV)
Subject: Re: xyzzy
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 01:46:51 GMT

The REAL original ZORK ran on DECsystem-10 and 20 systems, using
this bizzare language called MDL.  Think of LISP with C data structures
and you are partly on the way to MDL.  And make it an interpreter.

The game was actually started by "restoring" a MDL session to a
previous state.  So the creators got things in the environment ready
and then did the equivalent of a Holodeck "Freeze Program".   When you
played the game later, you did a "Resume Program".  I think they did
it this way to prevent you from dumping out the code.

One of the authors gave me the file "PARSER.MUD" from ZORK, circa 1979.
Uh, the code isn't that clear (even after reading the MDL primer), but it
looks impressive.  Stuff like:

<COND (<AND .ADJ
	    <COND (<AND <SET OBJ <GET-OBJECT <CHTYPE .ADJ PSTRING> <>>>
			<SET OS <STUFF-OBJ .OBJ .PREP .PREPVEC .PVR .VB>>>
		   <SET PREPVEC <1 .OS>>
		   <SET PVR <2 .OS>>
		   <SET PREP <SET ADJ <>>>)
		  (<OR .OBJ
		       <OR .VB
			   <TELL "I can't see any "
				 1
				 <LCIFY <STRINGP.ADJ>>
				 " here.">>>
			<RETURN <> >SPAROUT>)>>)
				    
(I used to scare the Survey of Languages courses with this code fragment.)

The original version said "Welcome to the dungeon", but came on the
tape from MIT named ZORK, but the actual program file was MADADV.SAV
or something like that. "ZORK" was simply a front end that started 
MDL and shoved the restore command into the interpreter.  The ZORK
executable also provided a way to block access to the game during prime
system hours, at least for people who didn't know how to run MDL directly.

I was really disappointed by the PC (and before that Z80) versions.
The mazes and puzzles were scaled way back from the original to make it
fit, and the parser was much stupider than the MDL one.  Even the
FORTRAN port by the unnamed DEC engineer (not me) never got things to
work as well as the MDL version worked.

Of course, one of the guys that worked on the Infocom PC port now goes
around telling people he was one of the original authors of ZORK, but he
was really working at GE at the time....

Frank Durda IV <[email-masked]>|"$ mdl104
or [email-masked] (Fastest Route)| restor <madadv.sav>$"
...letni!rwsys!nemesis!uhclem               |or something like that.
...decvax!fw.ast.com!nemesis!uhclem         |