|
Zork
''Zork'' is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson (programmer), 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''ZorkI: The Great Underground Empire'', ''ZorkII: The Wizard of Frobozz'', and ''ZorkIII: 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 processing, 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zork Photo
''Zork'' is a text 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''ZorkI: The Great Underground Empire'', ''ZorkII: The Wizard of Frobozz'', and ''ZorkIII: 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 Technology (M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Infocom
Infocom, Inc., 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 (software), 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 interactive fiction, 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Fiction
Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, 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 video game, role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "Text mode, text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics (still images, animations or video) 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 ... [...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 and design Nomenclature and conventions The "Z" of Z-machine stands for ''Zork'', Infocom's first adventure game. Infocom used file extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), but the latter clashed with the widespread use of .zip for PKZIP-compatible archive files starting in the 1990s, after Activision had closed Infocom. Infocom produced six versions of the Z-machine. Files using versions 1 a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tim Anderson (programmer)
Tim Anderson is an American computer programmer best known for co-creating the adventure game ''Zork'', one of the first works of interactive fiction and an early descendant of '' ADVENT'' (also known as ''Colossal Cave Adventure''). Career While attending MIT, Anderson got his start in game development by developing the game ''Trivia'' (1976) alongside future collaborator Marc Blank for the DEC PDP-10, the school's mainframe, playable over ARPANET. ''Trivia'' proved itself popular with the limited userbase of ARPANET, leading Anderson and Blank, as well as Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling to collaborate on a new game. All four were members of the Dynamic Modeling Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, with all but Blank working by day writing software for DARPA, which afforded them access to MIT's mainframe, even after they had graduated. The team had spent a considerable amount of time working on solving the game '' Colossal Cave Adventure'', mostly referred to a ... [...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''. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. 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). Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but elec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multi-user Dungeon
A multi-user dungeon (MUD, ), also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an Avatar (computing), avatar. Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by List of species in fantasy fiction, fictional races and monsters, with players choosing character class, classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objectiv ... [...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, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. '' Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', '' King's Quest'', '' Monkey Island'', '' Syberia'', and ''Myst''. Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dave Lebling
Peter David Lebling (born October 30, 1949) is an American 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'', ''Maze'' and ''James Clavell's Shōgun''. After Infocom's end in 1989, Lebling worked on a GUI spreadsheet program, joined Avid (a company doing special effe ... [...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, Inc., 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 experience 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
