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Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—''Zork I: The Great Underground Empire'', ''Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz'', and ''Zork III: The Dungeon Master''—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In ''Zork'', the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction. The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zork Photo
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—''Zork I: The Great Underground Empire'', ''Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz'', and ''Zork III: The Dungeon Master''—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In ''Zork'', the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction. The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called '' Cornerstone''. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom '' Zork'' brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. Overview Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted. Generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, and enters another short series of words. Example ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Fiction
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Text-based Adventure Game
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grue (monster)
A grue is a fictional, predatory creature that dwells in the dark. The term was first used to identify a human-bat hybrid predator in the '' Dying Earth'' series. The term was then borrowed to introduce a similar monster in ''Zork'', a 1977 interactive fiction computer game published by Infocom. Following ''Zork'''s massive commercial success, grues also appeared in other Infocom games such as '' Wishbringer'', and eventually became geek culture figures. With ''Zork''s prominent position in hacker history and lore, grues have become a reference model for monsters across generations of video games afterwards. ''Zork''s grues fear light and devour human adventurers, making it impossible to explore the game's dark areas without a light source. A common catchphrase associated with grues is a line in ''Zork'', which is displayed whenever players enter a dark area without a light source: "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." Ur-grue In the fourth ''Zork'' gam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marc Blank
Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, ''Zork''. Career Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will Crowther's ''Adventure'' game while he was studying at MIT in the mid-1970s, where the game was played on mainframe computers. Blank was frustrated by the computer's tiny vocabulary; when it parsed user inputs very few words were recognized. After thinking about the problem during his undergraduate years, he started work on his own adventure game using MDL, a computer language invented at MIT. Blank and a handful of friends wrote the original version of ''Zork'' on a PDP-10 while he was attending medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City (he received his MD degree in 1979). The free-play university version of ''Zork'' first became available on the MIT-DM PDP-10 in June 1977. It was then distributed by the Di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Z-machine
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system. History The "Z" of Z-machine stands for Zork, Infocom's first adventure game. Z-code files usually have names ending in .z1, .z2, .z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z7, or .z8, where the number is the version number of the Z-machine on which the file is intended to be run, as given by the first byte of the story file. This is a modern convention, however. Infocom itself used extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adventure Game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games ( text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include '' Zork'', '' King's Quest'', '' Monkey Island'', and '' Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adventure Game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games ( text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include '' Zork'', '' King's Quest'', '' Monkey Island'', and '' Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dave Lebling
Peter David Lebling (born October 30, 1949) is an interactive fiction game designer ( implementor) and programmer who has worked at various companies, including Infocom and Avid. Life and career He was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Maryland, and attended MIT, where he obtained a degree in political science before becoming a member of its Laboratory for Computer Science. After encountering the original ''Adventure'' game (also called ''Colossal Cave''), he was fascinated by the concept and—together with Marc Blank, Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels—set out to write an adventure game with a better parser, which became ''Zork''. In 1979, he became one of the founders of Infocom. His games include ''Zork I,'' ''II'' and ''III'', '' Starcross'', ''Suspect'', ''Spellbreaker'', '' The Lurking Horror'' and ''James Clavell's Shogun''. After Infocom's end in 1989, Lebling worked on a GUI spreadsheet program, joined Avid (a company doing special effects for broadcast and fil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used. The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the ''byte'' instructions, which operate on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as ''a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits''. The PDP-10 was found in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016. The company was founded as Activision, Inc. on October 1, 1979 in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari game developers upset at their treatment by Atari in order to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. The video game crash of 1983, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the expertise of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition of Infocom. Af ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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