The Golden Age of Computer Gaming

Chapter 1: In The Beginning Was The Word

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THE ESSENTIAL TRUTH

Before graphics could dazzle, before mice could click, there was the command prompt. And in this realm of pure text, the first digital storytellers created worlds with words alone.

THE PERFECT PROMPT

1975-1976. In a Kentucky cave system, programmer Will Crowther watched his daughters explore. Their imagination transformed every passage into adventure. Inspired, he sat down at his computer and created "Adventure" - not just a game, but a new form of storytelling.

Both Will and his ex-wife Patricia had been programmers and cavers who had extensively explored Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the longest cave system in the world. Patricia was instrumental in a culminating 1972 expedition that found the final connection between cave systems - the small, wiry woman could slip through a tiny squeeze too narrow for any of the men to try.

FROM THE CAVE

Perhaps to fill some of his unexpected spare time during their divorce, Crowther joined in on a new tabletop game some of his coworkers were playing called Dungeons & Dragons, just released the previous year. Like many other computer users of the time, he began to idly wonder if you could make something like D&D on the computer. In the fall of 1975, he decided to try. The impetus may have been an upcoming school holiday when his daughters would be visiting for a long weekend.

TECHNICAL MASTERY

Adventure represented a breakthrough in several key areas. Crowther created natural language parsing that could understand player commands, dynamic world states that changed based on actions, and sophisticated object interaction systems. The game featured comprehensive inventory management, evocative location descriptions, and intuitive navigation logic. Environmental puzzles challenged players while state persistence allowed them to save progress. Player feedback loops provided responses to every action, while an expanding vocabulary processed an impressive range of commands.

THE PROGRAMMER SPEAKS

According to Crowther in a later email: he originally intended for the magical elements to be buried deep within the cave, but when Don Woods expanded the game in 1977, Woods introduced the magic much earlier.

Once the game was complete, in early 1976, Crowther showed it off to his co-workers at BBN for feedback, and then considered his work on the game finished, leaving the compiled game on the mainframe before taking a month off for vacation. According to one of Crowther's then-coworkers in 2007, "once it was working, Will wasn't very interested in perfecting or expanding it."

THE NETWORK SPREADS

Crowther's work at BBN was in developing ARPANET, one of the first networks of computers and a precursor to the Internet, and the PDP-10 mainframe was part of that network. During his vacation, others found the game and it was distributed widely across the network to computers at other companies and universities, which surprised Crowther on his return.

THE STREETS COME ALIVE: ZORK'S REVOLUTION

When MIT students Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling discovered Adventure in 1977, they were fascinated but frustrated. Adventure's limited two-word command structure ("kill troll") seemed primitive to these ambitious programmers.

THE MIT INNOVATION

The MIT guys weren't impressed with Adventure's limited two-word command structure, so they wrote Zork to understand complete sentences ("kill troll with sword"). Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—who between them earned seven MIT degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, political science, and biology—bonded over their interest in computer games, then in their infancy, as they worked or consulted for the Laboratory for Computer Science's Dynamic Modeling Group.

TECHNICAL INNOVATION

Between 1977 and 1979, the four kept refining and expanding Zork until February 1979. The original version of Zork was written on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe that ran an operating system called ITS and a programming language called MDL—both developed at MIT.

Zork's technical achievements built upon Adventure's foundation while surpassing it in every way. The MIT team implemented advanced natural language parsing that could understand complete sentences, complex object interactions that felt natural and intuitive, and sophisticated inventory management systems. Room state memory preserved the consequences of player actions, while character-specific responses made the world feel alive. Multi-word command understanding eliminated Adventure's limitations, environmental storytelling painted vivid pictures with words, and intricate puzzle logic systems challenged players' minds. Score tracking gamified exploration, while save and restore functionality let players experiment without fear.

THE COMMERCIAL TRANSFORMATION

In 1979, Anderson, Blank, Lebling, and five other members of the Dynamic Modelling Group incorporated Infocom as a software company. No specific projects were initially agreed upon and Infocom had no paid employees, but discussions were focused on developing software for smaller mainframe computers.

Blank and Joel Berez came up with a plan to make Zork work on personal microcomputers, which were then beginning to become popular and which would greatly expand the audience for the game. Although microcomputers had very limited memory space compared to mainframe computers, they felt the project might be viable using floppy disks and a custom programming language if the game was cut into two pieces.

THE TECHNICAL SOLUTION

They ported the game to a new Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), which would then be run on a standardized 'Z-machine' software-based computer. For each type of microcomputer they wanted to release Zork or other ZIL-based games on, they could write an interpreter program that could run the Z-Machine instead of rewriting each game.

THE PERFECT TRILOGY

Since Personal Software declined to publish the 1979 PDP-11 version of the game, Infocom sold some copies earlier in the year after announcing it to PDP-11 user groups. Lebling later recalled that about twenty floppy disk copies were sold directly with Anderson's typewritten manual.

Zork: The Great Underground Empire, also known as Zork I or just Zork, was published for the TRS-80 in December 1980. As late as December 1980 Dave Lebling told Byte that it would be a two-part game, but it soon became clear that the second half would not fit into the allotted space. As a result, the game was split again into Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz and Zork III: The Dungeon Master.

THE DESIGNER REFLECTS

According to Lebling, splitting the game into episodes led to different atmospheres: Zork I was focused on exploration and Adventure-style gameplay, II had more of a focus on plot and added magic spells to the base game, and III was less straightforward, with time-sensitive aspects.

THE CULTURAL IMPACT

Zork I introduced the famous opening: 'You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.' The game also introduced the grue, a 'sinister, lurking presence' who kills adventurers who go exploring in the dark.

Zork was a pretty big hit, selling over a million copies. The success of Zork compelled Infocom to forget their original plan of creating business software and focus on text video games throughout much of the 1980s, releasing over 40 games across a variety of fictional genres.

THE PERFECT LEGACY

Nearly 40 years later, those PC games, which ran on everything from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 in their 1980s heyday, are available online—and still inspire technologists. Ben Brown, founder and CEO of Howdy.ai, says Zork helped him design AI-powered chatbots. 'Zork is a narrative, but embedded within it are clues about how the user can interact with and affect the story,' he says.

THE POWER OF WORDS

As 1985 dawned, text adventures had proved something profound: limitation breeds innovation. When all you have are words, every word must matter. Adventure had created world interaction while Zork built sophisticated language parsing. Together, they established that computers could be storytelling machines, proving that the best technology serves the story, not the other way around.