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Friday, 19 April 2019
quote [ With access to the source code, a group of dedicated fans is now tinkering with the Zork Implementation Language (ZIL). Infocom was eventually bought out by Activision in 1986, but was quickly shut down a few years later. There are more modern collections of Infocom games available, keeping the spirit of Zork alive, but the source code, which could teach us how Infocom managed to create such a sophisticated game at the time, had been deemed lost. That is, until this week, when internet archivist Jason Scott uploaded a collection of all Infocom text adventures and interactive fiction games’ source codes to GitHub, including the Zork games and Infocom’s video game adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ]
Awesome - I wonder if there's a mobile version
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5th Earth said @ 3:16pm GMT on 19th April
Zork is a prime example of how something can be historically important, highly influential, and a classic example of a genre, while still being objectively badly made by modern standards.
It's a bit like a Model T: the controls on a Model T are unintuitive, difficult to use, and frankly stupid. This isn't a matter the limited technology the time; they could have easily done things differently. It's a crucially important important piece of automotive history, but there are a lot of ways that it's just *bad* that can only be excused by the fact that it's an early example and they just didn't know any better.
5th Earth said @ 6:30pm GMT on 19th April
Zork is a prime example of how something can be historically important, highly influential, and a classic example of a genre, while still being objectively badly made by modern standards.
It's a bit like a Model T: the controls on a Model T are unintuitive, difficult to use, and frankly stupid. This isn't a matter the limited technology the time; they could have easily done things differently. It's a crucially important important piece of automotive history, but there are a lot of ways that it's just *bad* that can only be excused by the fact that it's an early example and they just didn't know any better.
Edit: I feel like I should clarify that this isn't a criticism of text adventures themselves, but of Zork as the archetypical text adventure. Zork is historically important, but there are other, later games in the genre that are much better.
<-- Entry / Current Comment
5th Earth said @ 3:16pm GMT on 19th April [Score:1 Interesting]
Zork is a prime example of how something can be historically important, highly influential, and a classic example of a genre, while still being objectively badly made by modern standards.
It's a bit like a Model T: the controls on a Model T are unintuitive, difficult to use, and frankly stupid. This isn't a matter the limited technology the time; they could have easily done things differently. It's a crucially important important piece of automotive history, but there are a lot of ways that it's just *bad* that can only be excused by the fact that it's an early example and they just didn't know any better.
Edit: I feel like I should clarify that this isn't a criticism of text adventures themselves, but of Zork as the archetypical text adventure. Zork is historically important, but there are other, later games in the genre that are much better.
