The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy
gaming; see ADVENT. Originally written on MIT-DM
during 1977-1979, later distributed with BSD Unix (as a patched, sourceless
RT-11 FORTRAN binary; see retrocomputing) and
commercialized as ‘The Zork Trilogy’ by
Infocom. The FORTRAN source was later rewritten for
portability and released to Usenet under the name Dungeon
.
Both FORTRAN Dungeon
and translated C versions are available
at many FTP sites; the commercial Zork trilogy is available at http://www.ifarchive.org/. See
also grue. You can play Zork via a Java
Applet.