~2 minute readLetters
Exploring Zork's Origins
While praising so highly the efforts to fight software piracy undertaken by the vendors of "Zork, The Great Underground Empire," Bob Liddil in his review (February 1981 BYTE, page 262) perhaps forgot to mention that the release of Zork seems to be an act of software piracy itself. From the description given, I infer that Zork is just an implementation of the well-known PDP-11 game Dungeon, distributed by Digital Equipment Corp.'s user group, DECUS. All the situations, descriptions, treasures, reactions, etc. are nearly identical to those found in Dungeon: the white house with the sack of peppers on the kitchen table, the forest where players are reincarnated, the jewel-encrusted egg in a nest on a tree, and more. The colorful description of situations has especially set Dungeon apart from preceding adventure games. Even the name Zork is taken from a situation in Dungeon. Yet in Zork's advertising you will not find a tiny nod to any of the numerous authors outside Personal Software Inc. who have done 99 percent of the work.
Greetings from a fanatic BYTE reader.
Hans Strasburger
Dipl. Math. Dipl. Psych.
Tal 58/IV
D-8000 Munich 2
West Germany
Response to Hans Strasburger:
A call to Personal Software Inc. revealed that Zork will no longer be distributed by that company. Zork is now being sold by Infocom of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joel Berez, president of Infocom, gave us a short history of Zork.
According to Mr. Berez, Zork was originally developed around 1977 and run on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 using a language called MDL. Sometime later a version was developed for the PDP-11 using FORTRAN, and this is the version being distributed by DECUS. This version was written by someone who had access to the original Zork source code. The microcomputer version formerly sold by Personal Software and now by Infocom was written by the authors of the original Zork: Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels, and Tim Anderson. The first micro-Zork, Zork I, was a subset of the original version. Zork II includes more of the original Zork situations than Zork I plus some additional enhancements. A future Zork III will contain the remaining original Zork material plus even more enhancements. Thus, the combination of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III would give the user all the original PDP-10 version plus many enhancements. For more information on Zork, see "Zork and the Future of Computerized Fantasy Simulations," December 1980 BYTE, page 172.
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
