Evolution of the text adventure

After Colossal Cave Adventure, the developers at MIT created the intrepid Zork in 1977 for the PDP-10 mainframe computer.

Zork was set underground, “in the ruins of an ancient empire” and contained many features similar to Colossal Cave such as the emphasis on searching for treasure and battling monsters, Yet it also had a more sophisticated text interface that supported prepositions. For example, HIT TROLL WITH ROCK.

The ultimate goal of the player is to attain the rank of Dungeon Master. Zork also established the jokey in-game currency of Zorkmids, that would later become the money of choice for other dungeon-themed games such as NetHack.

Zork was large and memory-intensive by 1980s standards. Games Developer InfoCom overcame this limitation with the Z-Machine, a virtual machine capable of compiling game code written in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) into special files, which could be played on home computers.

In 1982 Infocom released the murder mystery text game Deadline. This started the tradition of including so-called ‘feelies’ with text games (in this case some clues and notes taken from police interviews).

These days interactive fiction fans can still compile story files using Graham Nelson’s programming language ‘Inform’ and indeed the genre still has a thriving community online which holds text adventure competitions every year.

If you want to explore the history of text adventures further, we strongly recommend the documentary GetLamp, which is available from www.getlamp.com.