![]() Hibernated 1 - This Place is Death (Director's Cut) is an Infocom style interactive fiction game. The artificial intelligence Io seems to be her only remaining friend now. After nearly 20 years in hypersleep, she wakes up alone on her stranded ship, the Polaris-7. Have you ever dreamed about a journey far beyond the known regions of the universe? Close to Alpha Centauri, Olivia Lund is on the trail of one of mankind's greatest secrets and a thousand-year-old mystery. ![]() The GUE, as it was known, was full of interesting things to explore, including an ancient temple, a volcano, and a wizard’s workshop.News: Zzap! 64 Micro Ac. Jessica Brillhart, a filmmaker who creates virtual-reality videos, also cites Zork as an influence: “It provides a great way to script immersive experiences and shows how to craft a full universe for people to explore.” Zork creator Dave Lebling created this hand-drawn map of the game’s “Great Underground Empire” in the late 1970s. “It’s a good model for how chatbots should teach users how to respond to and use commands without being heavy-handed and repetitive.” For example, the line “You are in a dark and quite creepy crawlway with passages leaving to the north, east, south, and southwest” hints to players that they must choose a direction to move, but it doesn’t make those instructions as explicit as actually telling them, “Type ‘north,’ ‘east,’ ‘south,’ or ‘southwest.’” Brown’s chatbot, Howdy, operates similarly, using bold and highlighted fonts to draw attention to keywords, like “check in,” and “schedule,” that people can use to communicate with the bot. “Zork is a narrative, but embedded within it are clues about how the user can interact with and affect the story,” he says. Ben Brown, founder and CEO of Howdy.ai, says Zork helped him design AI-powered chatbots. 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. Its first product: a modified version of Zork, split into three parts, released over three years, to fit PCs’ limited memory size and processing power. A few months later, three of them, plus seven other Dynamic Modeling Group members, founded the software company Infocom. The four kept refining and expanding Zork until February 1979. “If we found a lot of people using a word the game didn’t support, we would add it as a synonym,” says Daniels. “They would see someone running something called Zork, rummage around in the MIT file system, find and play the game, and tell their friends.” The MIT mainframe operating system (called ITS) let Zork’s creators remotely watch users type in real time, which revealed common mistakes. “The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the Arpanet,” says Anderson. Within weeks of its creation, Zork’s clever writing and inventive puzzles attracted players from across the U.S. Wordplay also cropped up in irreverent character names such as “Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive” and “The Wizard of Frobozz.” It had no graphics, but lines like “Phosphorescent mosses, fed by a trickle of water from some unseen source above, make glow and sparkle with every color of the rainbow” helped players envision the “Great Underground Empire” they were exploring as they brandished such weapons as glowing “Elvish swords.” “We played with language just like we played with computers,” says Daniels. The parser also let players input sentences like “Take all but rug” to scoop up multiple treasures, rather than making them type “Take ” over and over. That meant Zork could support intricate puzzles, such as one that let players obtain a key by sliding paper under a door, pushing the key out of the lock so it would drop onto the paper, and retrieving the paper. ![]() The parser, which the group continued to fine-tune, allowed Zork to understand far more words than previous games, including adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, and compound verbs. By June, they’d devised many of Zork’s core features and building blocks, including a word parser that took words the players typed and translated them into commands the game could process and respond to, propelling the story forward. ![]()
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