THE HISTORY OF ZORK - FIRST IN A SERIES
Copyright (c) Infocom
by Tim Anderson (New Zork Times; Winter 1985, pages 6-7, 11)
Transcribed by Graeme Cree
In the beginning, back in the 1960's, DEC (Digital Equipment
Corporation) created the PDP, a medium-sized computer. The "10" as it was
called, became popular at many research institutions, and a great deal of
software was written for it, some of which is still far in advance of systems
on more modern machines. MIT's Artificial Intelligence, an operating system
called (Incompatible Time-share System) was written for the ITS was designed
to make software development easy. But designers of the system assumed that
it would have a small, knowledgeable, friendly group of users, so they did
not include security features.
Around 1970, the ARPAnet was invented. ARPAnet mad it possible for
researchers all over the country (indeed, all over the world) to communicate
with each other, and to use each other's machines. In this halcyon days,
access was restricted; you could get on any machine connected to the net, or
by knowing an appropriate phone number. Budding hackers from around the
country soon discovered that this made a wonderful playground. They
discovered that there were some computers at MIT with some neat stuff on them
and no security - anyone who could connect to the machines could log in.
Also around 1970, a language called MUDDLE (later renamed MDL) was
developed as a successor to LISP. It never succeeded in fully replacing LISP,
but it developed a loyal user community of its own, primarily at MIT.
Project MAC (now called the Laboratory for Computer Science) and especially
in the Dynamic Modelling Group (later the Programming Technology Division).
The Dynamic Modelling Group (DM), in addition to its other accomplishments,
was responsible for some famous games. The first of these was a multi-player
graphics game called MAZE, in which players wandered around a maze shooting
each other. Each user's screen shoed the view of the maze that his or her
computerized alter-ego saw. It was updated in real time. Dave Lebling was
among those chiefly responsible (to blame?) for the existence of the game.
The next game of note was TRIVIA (who says research labs aren't ahead of
their time?), an ongoing "can you top this" contest for the truly crazed.
TRIVIA, unlike MAZE, could be played by network users, and achieved wide
popularity on the ARPAnet. Marc Blank wrote the second version, and I
maintained/hacked it; it was actually a legitimate test of a database system
the group used for a research project.
In early 1977, ADVENTURE swept the ARPAnet. Wilie Crowther was the
original author, but Don Woods greatly expanded the game and unleashed it on
an unsuspecting network. When ADVENTURE arrived at MIT, the reaction was
typical; after everybody spent a lot of time doing nothing but solving the
game (it's estimated that ADVENTURE set the entire computer industry back two
weeks), the true lunatics began to think about how they could do it better.
ADVENTURE was written in FORTRAN, after all, so it couldn't be very smart.
It accepted only two-word commands, it was obviously hard to change, and the
problems were sometimes not everything one could desire. (I was present when
Bruce Daniels, one of the DM'ers, figured out how to get the last point in
ADVENTURE by examining the game with a machine-language debugger. There was
no other way to do it.)
By late May, ADVENTURE had been solved, and various DM'ers were looking
for ways to have fun. Marc Blank was enjoying a respite from medical school;
I had just finished my master's degree; Bruce Daniels was getting bored with
his Ph.D topic; and Dave Lebling was heartily sick of Morse Code. Dave wrote
(in MUDDLE) a command parser that was almost as smart as ADVENTURE's; Marc
and I, who were both in the habit of hacking all night, took advantage of
this to write a prototype four-room game. It has long since vanished. There
was a band, a bandbox, a peanut room (the band was outside the door, playing
"Hail to the Chief") and a "chamber filled with deadlines." Dave played and
tested the game, saw that it was pretty awful, and left to spend two weeks
basking in the sun.
Marc, Bruce and I sat down to write a real game. We began by drawing
some maps, inventing some problems, and arguing a lot about how to make
things work. Bruce still had some thoughts of graduating, thus preferring
design to implementation, so Marc and I spent the rest of Dave's vacation in
the terminal room implementing the first version of ZORK. ZORK, by the way,
was never really named. "Zork" was a nonsense word floating around; it was
usually a verb, as in "zork the fweep," and may have been derived from
"zorch." ("Zorch" is another nonsense word implying total destruction.) We
tended to name our programs with the word "zork" until they were ready to be
installed on the system.
By the time Dave got back, there was a more-or-less) working game. It
probably wasn't as big as ADVENTURE, and was certainly less than half the
size of the final version, but it had the thief, the cyclops, the troll, the
reservoir and dam, the house, part of the forest, the glacier, the maze, and
a bunch of other stuff. The problems were not as interesting as those that
came later: it took time for people to learn how to write good problems, and
the early parswers wouldn't support complicated solutions anyway. What we
had done right was lal in the "substratum." There was a well-defined (and
easily-changed theory governing interactions among objects, verbs, and rooms.
It was easy to drop in new parsers, which happened frequently, since everyone
and his uncle tried his hand at writing a parser (Marc finally became
obsessed with it, and wrote the last 40 or 50 of them himself). And it was
very easy to add new rooms, objects, and creatures. (I won't discuss the
difficulty of adding new concepts yet).
ZORK, like ADVENTURE, survived only because it was layed by people
outside the small community that developed it. In the case of ADVENTURE,
this was possible because it was written in FORTRAN and could run on
practically any machine. ZORK was written in MUDDLE, which ran on only some
PDP-10s. It's user community was the group of "net randoms" that infested
the MIT systems; remember that we had no security at all at this time. DM
had developed an active community largely because of TRIVIA. Since TRIVIA
was pretty dead by the time ZORK came along, there weren't many other things
for the randoms to do, so they hung around waiting for the next game. Early
players of ZORK ranged from John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP (we actually
have a copy of the connectivity matrix that McCarthy used instead of a map),
to twelve-year olds from Northern Virginia. No one ever officially announced
ZORK; people would log in to DM, see that someone was running a program named
ZORK, and get interested. They would then "snoop" on the console of the
person running ZORK, and see that it was an ADVENTURE-like game. From there,
it only took a little more effort to find out how to start it up. For a long
time, the magic incantation was ":MARC;ZORK"; people who had never heard of
ITS, DM or PDP-10s somehow heard that if they got to something called "host
70" on the ARPAnet logged in, and typed the magic word, they could play a
game.
Although ZORK in June 1977 wa infinitely more primitive than, say, Zork
I, it still had pretty much the same flavor. The Flathead family was
represented in the person of Lord Dimwith Flathead the Excessive, ruler of
the Great Underground Empire, and the official currency was the zorkmid.
Bruce was responsible for the purplish prose where these were first mentioned.
Many of the details of the GUE were whimsical (if not silly), but we
weren't completely immune to reality. In those days, if one wandered around
in the dark area of the dungeon, one fell into a bottomless pit. Many users
pointed out that a bottomless pit in an attic should be noticeable from the
ground floor of the house. Dave came up with the notion of grues, and he
wrote their description. From the beginning (or almost the beginning,
anyway), the living room had a copy of "US News & Dungeon Report," describing
recent changes in the game. All changes were credited to some group of
implementors, but not necessarily to those actually responsible: one of the
issues described Bruce working for weeks to fill in all the bottomless pits
of the dungeon, thus forcing packs of grues to roam around.
The first major addition to the game, done in June 1977, was the river
section, designed and implemented by Marc. It survives largely unchanged in
ZORK I, but illustrates very well the problems of building reality. There
were minor problems of consistency - some parts of the river were sunlit (and
even reachable from outside), but others were dark. The major problem
resulted from the new concept. Marc introduced: vehicles. In the original
game, there were rooms, objects, and a player; the player always existed in
some room. Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms. This
required changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs, objects,
and rooms (we had to have some way of amking "walk" do something reasonable
when the player was in the boat). In addition, ever-resourceful Zorkers
tried to use the boat anywhere they thought they could. The code for the
boat itself was not designed to function outside the river section, but
nothing keep the player from carrying the deflated boat to the reservoir and
trying to sail across. Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but
the general problem always remained: anything that changes the world you're
modelling changes practically everything in the world you're modelling.
Although ZORK was only a month old, it could already surprise its
authors. The boat, due to the details of its implementation, turned into a
"bag of holding"" players could put practically anything into it and carry
it around, even if the weight of the contents far exceeded what a player was
allowed to carry. The boat was two separate objects: the "inflated boat"
object contained the objects, but the player carried the "deflated boat"
object around. We knew nothing about this: someone finally reported it to
us as a bug. As far as I know, the bug is still there.
[Coming up in the next issue: ZORK assumes an alias]
THE HISTORY OF ZORK - Second in a Series
by Tim Anderson (New Zork Times; Spring 1985, pages 3-5)
When last seen, Zork was a small game (probably slightly more than half
the size of the final mainframe version) that ran on one computer. Although
it was only six weeks old, and had never been advertised, it had a relatively
large user community from all over the country. In some ways it was better
than the classic ADVENTURE at this time, but mostly it was the next game to
come along, and it wasn't even the only contender.
The characters: MIT-DM, a PDP-10 running ITS; MDL (aka Muddle), a
language that ran only on PDP-10s; Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling,
and Tim Anderson, intrepid implementors; and assorted net randoms.
July 1977 saw two major additions to the game, the last for several
months (we weren't exactly hired to write the thing, after all). The first
of these was another BKD special: Bruce didn't write much code, but he was
willing to design problems. We went to him, and asked for a particularly
nasty section; the result was the coal mine. His design was originally
nastier than the final implementation, since the maze was just about as
horrible as the original one in the game; it got simplified due to popular
demand. The problems were improving in quality, and the coal mine maze was a
late example of making things hard by making them tedious.
The volcano section was Marc's second vehicle implementation, but is
perhaps more noteworthy for the loving portraits of Lord Dimwit Flathead the
Excessive that decorated the coin and stamp found in the section. The river
(see Part I) and volcano sections, in addition to vehicles, required a better
concept of time; both the boat and the balloon moved more or less on their
own, and the volcano required the use of explosives and fuses. Marc added a
clock daemon, which processed a queue of events that would hapen some fixed
number of moves later. This handled, in addition to the movement of the
vehicles, the fuse, the lantern burning out, and the mysterious gnomes that
occasionally appear. The first of these was in the volcano: if the player
got trapped in the upper reaches of the volcano by losing his balloon, after
a few moves a volcano gnome would appear and offer freedom in exchange for a
treasure. We were just being nice, most players weren't allowed to save
their games, so they had no way of backing out if they made such a mistake.
The gnome allowed them to keep playing, albeit with no chance of getting all
the points.
Even before the volcano section, we'd talked about a problem that
involved flying; Dave had a preference for something with an eagle, and its
aerie, but we could never figure out how to restrict things enough - it
wouldn't do to have a parallel map of the game viewed from the air. Once
again, we worried about restraining a new concept, so the balloon had no way
of leaving the volcano. And once again we were bitten by a new concept.
When the player used the explosives in the wrong place, and didn't get out of
the way, he'd end up with 20,000 pounds (or was it tons?) of rock on his head.
this made a certain amount of sense in the underground section, but not out
in the forest.
No more sections were added to the game for several months after July,
but it continued to improve. In addition, it finally moved to machines other
than DM, thus greatly expanding the number of players.
Although, Muddle ran primarily on DM, a version for TENEX (the most
popular PDP-10 operating system on the ARPAnet) had existed for some time;
the TENEX version could, with some minor modifications, run on TOPS-20 as
well. We finally succumbed to one of the requests for a copy of ZORK when we
were given an account on a TOPS-20 machine on the net. After we made the
necessary software modifications, of course, many copies could be made; a
mailing list of ZORK owners developed, so they could get whatever update
appeared.
Although people could get runnable ZORKS, they couldn't get sources. We
tried two approaches to protecting the source (remember, there was no
protection of any sort on DM): they were normally kept encrypted and we
patched the system to protect the directory where we kept the sources (named
CFS, for either"Charles F. Stanley" or "Computer Fantasy and Simulation").
This worked pretty well, but was finally beaten by a system hacker from
Digital: using some archaic ITS documentation (there's never been any other
kind), he was able to figure out how to modify the running operating system.
Being clever, he was also able to figure out how our patch to protect the
source directory worked. Then it was just a matter of decrypting the sources,
but that was soon reduced to figuring out the key we'd used. Ted had no
trouble getting machine time; he just found a new TOPS-20 machine that was
undergoing final testing and started a program that tried every key until it
got something that looked like text. After less than a day of crunching, he
had a readable copy of the source. We had to concede that anyone who'd go to
that much trouble deserved it. This led to some other things later on.
Players hadn't been able to save their ZORKS because the method we used
at first took several hundred thousand bytes for each save, and even on a
time-sharing system that was excessive. Marc, around this time, invented a
new way of saving that cut the size down to something more reasonable, with
the slight disadvantages that any new rooms or objects added to the old game
would break existing save files, and that it never quite worked right anyway.
However, it did make it easier to play the game, and we still had the silly
notion of being nice to our users.
Fall '77 saw two major additions to the game, as Marc took another break
from medical school (yes, fans, he did graduate on time), and Dave got into
coding in a big way. The Alice in Wonderland section, complete with its
magic bucket and robot, was installed. The robot was the first "actor," an
object that could perform some of the same tasks the player could. The style
of address was familiar: "ROBOT, TAKE THE CAKE." The implementation of this
required another change in the game's flow of control, and changes to
anything else that one could reasonably talk to.
The first version of fighting was added about the same time. Dave, an
old Dungeons and Dragons player, didn't like the completely predictable ways
of killing creatures off. In the original game, for example, one killed a
troll by throwing a knife at him, he would catch the knife and gleefully eat
it (like anything you threw at him), but hemorrhage as a result. Dave added
basically the full complexity of D&D-style fighting, with different strengths
for different weapons, wounds, unconsciousness, and death. Each creature had
its own set of messages, so a fight with the thief (who uses a stiletto)
would be very different from a fight with the troll and his axe.
As a result of the purloined sources at DEC, a lunatic there decided to
translate ZORK into FORTRAN. We had always assumed this would be impossible.
Muddle is very (oops, VERY) different from FORTRAN, and MUCH more complicated,
and we'd used most of its features in designing ZORK. The guy who did it was
mostly a hardware person, so perhaps he didn't know what he was up against.
At any rate, shortly after the Great Blizzard of '78 he had a working
version, initially for PDP-11s. Since it was in FORTRAN, it could run on
practically anything, and by now it has.
Unfortunately, at some point in the preceeding year we (no one will now
admit to suggesting the idea) had decided to change the name of the game.
ZORK was too much of a nonsense word, not descriptive of the game, etc., etc.,
etc. Silly as it sounds, we eventually started callin it DUNGEON. (Dave
admits to suggesting the new name, but that's only a minor sin.) When Bob
the lunatic released his FORTRAN version to the DEC users' group, that was
the name he used. I'm sure many people have noticed a curious similarity
between the DUNGEON game they played on their friendly IBM 4341 and the ZORK
I they played on their equally friendly IBM PC; now you know why.
Fortunately for us, a certain company (which shall remain nameless)
decided to claim that it had trademark rights to the name DUNGEON, as a
result of certain games that it sold. We didn't agree (and MIT had some very
expensive lawyers on retainer who agreed with us), but it encouraged us to do
the right thing, and not hide our Zorks under a bushel.
The next section that was added was intended to be the last. After a
player had accumulated the points in the game, he could play the End Game,
designed largely by Dave. This became the section of ZORK III with the
Dungeon Mster, and at the time was certainly the most involved and hardest
(as it should have been) thing in the game. The implementation was, if
anything, more involved than the problem. Less than two months later though,
Marc had come up with something worse, probably during a boring anatomy
lecture. The bank section has probably been fully deciphered by fewer people
than anything else in the game; even those who solve it on their own don't
usually understand what was going on. I can only say that it makes sense if
you understand it.
For some time, we'd been getting bug reports, fan mail, and suggestions
for new problems from all sorts of people. We were beginning to run a little
short of ideas anyway, and one of the ideas we got was very good. During a
lengthy dinner at Roy's, our favorite Chinese restaurant, we worked out the
details of the jewel-encrusted egg, purple-prose courtesy of Dave. Many
people on the net had long since solved the game, but went back in and did
any new problems that came along; one of them had played D&D with Dave, and
called him about a day after the egg was announced. "I've gotten the egg
opened, but I assume you losers have some nonsense where you do something
with the canary and the songbird." Dave, no fool, said "Cough, cough, ahem,
of course," and immediately went off and added the brass bauble.
The remaining puzzles, the Royal Zork Puzzle Museum and the palantirs,
were added in the late summer and fall of 1978. The puzzle was designed
(several times) primarily by Bruce, who in theory was back trying to finish
his dissertation. Finding the minimum number of moves required to solve it
was a popular pasttime among dedicated Zorkers for a while.
The last (lousy) point was a tribute to the final point in the original
ADVENTURE, which involved leaving a particular object in a particular room
for no particular reason. When we first solved ADVENTURE in 1977, Bruce
finally figured this out by using a machine-language debugger on the running
game (since ADVENTURE was not written in machine language, this was not easy).
The major difference between that and our version (a stamp worth One Lousy
point) is that it would be harder to find ours without the source of the game.
The last puzzle was added in February of '79. We (mainly I, at this
point) kept fixing bugs for almost two more years - the last mainframe update
was created in January of '81. No new puzzles were added because none of the
implementors had time or inclination, and because we had no more space
available: at the time, we were limited to a megabyte of memory, and we had
used it all up. The first article about ZORK appeared in April of '79, and
attracted a great deal of interest, some of this may have been because we
offered to give people the game (if they didn't already have it), and gave
them parts of the sacred sources as well.
Infocom was incorporated in 1979 by various people from the DM group,
including Marc, Dave, and me. It was not founded to sell ZORK; rather, it
was founded to give group members somewhere to go from MIT. Marc and Joel
Berez (both exiled to Pittsburgh) determined that it would be possible to
make ZORK run on something cheaper than the $400,000 PDP-10, and the company
eventually went along. See the next NZT for further details.
In the meantime, we still get requests for hints on the mainframe ZORK
(sometimes it's called DUNGEON, and often it's running on something other
than a PDP-10). The most recent request for a copy came in on April 1, but I
think it was serious.
THE HISTORY OF ZORK - THE FINAL (?) CHAPTER: MIT, MDL, ZIL, ZIP
by Stu Galley (New Zork Times; Summer 1985, pages 4-5)
The year: 1979. As Tim Anderson has recounted in previous installments
in this series, ZORK was one large computer game, about a megabyte in size -
as large as it could be and still fit in its original home, a DECsystem-10.
Marc Blank and Dave Lebling designed and wrote the program with the help of
Bruce Daniels and Tim. They had met and worked together in a research group
at M.I.T., and now the group was losing valuable talent through graduation
and the lure of "the real world." Several members of the group believed that
they could still produce outstanding computer-based products in almost any
category - from programming languages like MDL (an important influence on
modern LISP) to databases, electronic mail, and artificially intelligent
systems - if only centrifugal force didn't separate them.
The problem: What sort of product could the group work on together, and
to whom could they sell it? As early as 1976, they had discussed the
potential marketability of various computer games that had been designed or
implemented by group members just for fun. Now their attention was focused
on various potential products based on mini-computers, some involving custom
hardware as well as software. The group was ignoring the potential of a mass
market for micro-computers, not only from lack of experience with them (the
group's unofficial mottis is "We hate micros!") but also from serious
concerns about software piracy.
Joel Berez had graduated from the group and was working in his family's
business in Pittsburgh. Marc had finished medical school (and moonlighting
on ZORK development) and was starting his medical residency in Pittsburgh.
These two had long been friends, and they liked getting together for a
Chinese dinner and conversation.
One topic of conversation was "the good old days" at M.I.T., and one
reason that the old days were good was ZORK. They wished that ZORK's
wonderfulness (or "taste and winnage" in M.I.T. jargon) could somehow be
brought to more people. But very few people had access to the large
computers that could run ZORK. More and more people were beginning to buy
personal computers - like the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I or the Apple II -
but those computers were too small to run ZORK. Or were they?
Joel and Marc began some seat-of-the-pants design work (much of it on
Joel's parents' coffee table) on how much ZORK could be compressed, and how
to do so in a flexible way to allow for different, incompatible personal
computers in the future. They considered using available "portable" tools
for programming, like UCSD Pascal, but it soon beclame clear that ZORK had
too much texst in it. (Keep in mind that a standard personal computer at
this time came with 16K bytes of memory and no disk drive.) They finally
concluded that, by inventing a programming system specifically for ZORK, they
could fit about half of it into a computer with 32K bytes of memory and one
floppy-disk drive.
Meanwhile, the group at M.I.T. was in the process of forming a
corporation - choosing "Infocom" as the name least offensive to everyone -
and searching for a project that would quickly produce a product to start
generating income for the company. Among the projects they considered were
systems for keeping track of documents, handling electronic correspondence,
and processing text. When ZORK was added to the list of possibillities, Joel
and Marc worked intensively during the summer and autumn creating the
programming tools for their design. And they had to work for IOUs, since the
company treasury - which started with only $11,500 - could afford to pay only
for the hardware they needed at the time.
The key to their design was an imagineary computer chip called the "Z-
machine." This chip would be able to run ZORK (or at least part of it) if
the program were coded in a special, very compact language. Then the design
called for each personal computer to have a program (called a Z-machine
Interpreter Program or ZIP) that would interpret the special Z-machine
language and make the computer act the same way that a real Z-machine would.
In order to get ZORK written in this special language, another language was
invented, called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), similar in many ways to
MDL. Marc built a two-stage translator program that would translate a ZIL
program, first into an assembly language and then further into the Z-machine
language. He also built a ZIP so that a DECsystem-20 could emulate the Z-
machine.
There was still the problem of cutting ZORK in half. Dave examined his
complete map of ZORK and drew a boundary around a portion that included about
100 or so locations: everything "above ground" and a large section
surrounding the Round Room. The object was to create a smaller ZORK that
would fit within the constraints established by the design of Joel and Marc.
Whatever wouldn't fit was to be saved for another game, another day.
In the process of being converted from MCL into ZIL, the program became
"cleaner" and friendlier. the geographies of the maze and the coal mine were
simplified so that the connections were less arbitrary, and in other places
complexity was removed whenever it didn't serve a justifiable purpose. For
example, there was originally a barrel sitting near the top of Aragain Falls,
but it was just a red herring, its only purpose was to lure unsuspecting
adventurers inside and carry them over the falls to destruction. The Rainbow
Room had its name changed to On the Rainbow, and that meant removing the
silly joke about Rockefeeer Center and the NEC Commisasary. Since the Land
of the (Living) Dead (the word "Living" was removed in order to fit the name
on the status line) no longer led to the stairway when ZORK III later began,
the crystal skull ( a brand-new treasure) was put there instead.
By late 1979, Joel and Mard had both moved back to Bostn. jeol had been
elected president of Infocom and started business school, and ZORK I was
shaping up as Infocom's first product. ZORK I frist saw the light of day on
the DECsystem-20 on which the company was renting time, then on the PDP-11 in
Joel's bedroom. Scott Cutler (who had graduated from the group a couple of
years before) used his TRS-80 Model I to create a ZIP for a TRS-80 Model I.
As 1980 dawned, Infocom spent a large portion of the bank account to purchase
a Model I, and Scott and Marc demonstrated that ZORK I was alive in it by
starting the game and actually collecting points with the incantation
"NE.OPEN.IN." (It's certainly no less inspiring than "Come here, Mr. Watson;
I want you."
Mike Dornbrook was enlisted to test ZORK I for bugs and other bad
features because he had some experience with computers but no experience with
the original ZORK, exactly like our intended audience. (One of his
contributions was the alternate - and, some say, more logical - solution to
the Loud Room puzzle, which was added only after the first users of ZORK I
asked so often for hints for that puzzle.) He played it so much that he
memorized the entire geography, and he fell in love with the game. He was
convinced that it would attract a cult following, although others thought it
would last maybe a year on the market and then fade away, like a video game.
He urged the company to start planning spin-off products, like maps, hints,
posters, T-shirts, etc. So the first published release of ZORK I had another
feature added, a "small piece of paper" in the artist's studio that said
something like: "Write to Infocom, P.O. Box 120, Cambridge, Mass. 02142 for
info on other products, including Movement Assistance Planners (M.A.P.s) and
Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (H.I.N.T.S.)." Besides
leaving the door open for an after-market in ZORK accessories, we wanted to
start building a mailing list of customers for future direct mailings (like
the one you are reading!)
Now that the company had a flesh-and-blood product, how could a small
group of hackers market and sell it? One possibility was to produce it
ourselves and distribute it through computer chain stores. But that meant
devoting time and energy to finding suppliers, producing packages, supporting
users, and so on. Another possibility was to contract with a software
publisher, but which one? Joel contacted Microsoft, but they were already
publishing the original "Colossal Cave" adventure game - the one that
inspired ZORK - and by the time ZORK fan Bill Gates heard of our offer,
Infocom was deep in negotiations with Personal Software Inc. (PS).
PS had several good features: it was the first true publsiher of
software developed by others; it was the leading publisher of computer games
at the time; and it had strong ties to Software Arts Inc., where VISICALC was
invented (requiescant in pace), and where ZORK I was demonstrated in February
1980. PS agreed in June to publish Zork I and sent us an advance on
royalties, our first bonafide income! Sales began in December, and over the
next nine months PS sold about 1500 copies of the TRS-80 version.*
Also in June, we paid for a search of trademark records in preparation
for registering "Zork" as our own trademark. We discovered that Mattel Inc.
had registered "Mighty Zork" in 1973 for a toy model motorcycle, but that
registration was cancelled in October 1979. Other trademarks discovered in
the search were the likes of Zorr, Zorak, Zark, and Zowees (all by Mattel);
Zogg, Zon, Zak, Zok, Zot, Zonk, and Zerak; and variations on Mork and Ork (by
Paramount Pictures). Not to mention the Zork Hardware Company of El Paso and
Albuquerque. (See Mail Bag.)
We had another product which PS had no interest: PDP-11 version of ZORK
I. We saw product announcements in various places, including a newsletter
for PDP-11 users, and as a result, the first copy of ZORK sold was a PDP-11
version. It came on an eight-inch floppy disk with a manual that I wrote and
Joel had reproduced from a typewritten master.
By the end of 1980, the verion of ZIP for the Apple II had been created
by Bruce, who had designed puzzles for the original ZORK before graduating
from M.I.T. and going to work for Apple Computer Inc. Apple ZORK proved more
popular than the TRS-80 version: PS sold over 6000 copies in eight months.
The first press reviews of ZORK were encouraging. In February 1981,
BYTE magazine said, "No single advance in the science of Adventure has been
as bold and exciting as the introduction of Personal Software Inc's ZORK:
THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE...That the program is entertaining, eloquent,
witty, and precisely written is almost beside the point. Unlike the kingdom
of the Adventures for machines with 16K bytes of memory and far from the
classic counter-earthiness of the Colossal Cave in the original ADVENTURE,
ZORK can be felt and touched - experienced, if you will - through the care
and attention to detail the authors have rendered...[A] most excellent and
memorable work of computerized fiction."
Mike Dornbrook was enlisted again to fulfill mail orders for
personalized hints. Joel collected orders from the post office box, passed
orders for maps and posters to his Signifigant Other for fulfillment, gave
requests for hints to Mike, and gave me the numerous small checks to deposit
in the bank. Mike created personalized hints off the top of his head, typing
them on an old office typewriter. (When Mike started business school in
September 1981, he founded a separate company, the Zork User's Group, and
took over all mail-order sales. Only then did he computerize the operation.
In 1983, Mike came back to work for Infocom, bringing Z.U.G. with him.)
Meanwhile, Dave was designing ZORK II. At first, the most
straightforward approach seemed to be to use everything left out of ZORK I
and simply convert it from MDL to ZIL. But Dave's overactive imagination
kept inventing new puzzles that virtually begged to be implemented. So the
final design left out the Royal Puzzle and the "end-game" (both to appear in
ZORK III), and instead included the Wizard of Frobozz, the garden, and the
new diamond maze. (The last was re-oriented to the compass based on Mike's
belief that "southpaw" should be a hint.) The last of the original puzzles -
the long slide and "sending out for the brochure" - were left out of ZORK III
and didn't reappar until SORCERER.
ZORK II was offered to PS in April and licensed in June 1981, about the
same time that Joel graduated and became Infocom's first salaried employee.
But we had serious concerns about PS's commitment, even to ZORK I. After an
initial rush of advertising, ZORK I seemed to join PS's range of products as
just another game. We were eager to make new versions and new titles -
including ZORK III, "Zork: The Mystery" (DEADLINE), and "Zorks in Space"
(STARCROSS) - but not if our publsher wasn't also eager. The fact was that
PS was planning to drop its line of entertainment software - since their
titles neither sold well over the long term nor brought in enough money to
satisfy them - and to change its name to Visicorp in order to identify
closely with its "Visi-" series of business products.**
It now appeared that we had two choices: to negotiate and contract with
another publisher (and to hope for more satisfaction), or to take the plunge
and become a publisher. We definitely preferred the second choice, but that
required office space, production facilities, an advertising agency, and so
on - and most of all, money. But we threw caution to the wind, and hired
Mort Rosenthal (who later founded Corporate Software Inc.), a marketing
manager, who found a time-shared office in Boston's venerable Faneuil Hall
Marketplace, a time-shared production plant in Randolph, an ad agency in
Watertown, an order-taking service in New Jersey, a supplier of disks in
California, and so on. The money came both from the company's founders and
from a bank loan that they personally guaranteed.
We announced ZORK II and our new role as publisher with a Christmas
promotion as eye-catching as we could afford. Thanks to our ad agency, we
had a new style of packaging for both ZORKS (the stone-built letters that are
still in use), a counter display for stores, ads in major computer magazines,
and direct-mail ads for dealers. We also bought PS's entire inventory of
ZORK I (except the TRS-80 version, which they still wanted to sell) to
prevent them from "dumping" it on the market at bargain prices and lowering
the public's image of "Zork" in general. Our first shipment went out just in
time for Christmas sales.
On New Years Day 1982, we moved the company to large space at the far
end of Cambridge - 55 Wheeler Street. Now we had office space for everyone,
expecially for Marc (now vice-president for product development) to finish
ZORK III. And we had enough space to set up all the personal computers -
instead of shuffling them from one person's home to another - for testers to
use, and for programmers to create or adapt ZIPS for Atari, CP/M, IBM PC, and
other machines. ZORK III was finished in the autumn, about the same time
that the company began hiring people to begin developing its first business
product. But that's another story.
* ZORK I came under the wing of PS's New Products Manager, a fellow named
Mitch Kapor, who later founded Lotus Development Corp.
** In December 1984, after a long legal tangle with Software Arts over
VisiCalc, Visicorp eventually merged into one of its own spin-off
companies and disappeared.
