Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

1977: Zork

if50.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 94 posts

Re: 1977: Zork

#21

Post by narrator »

reaperducer wrote: post #18
narrator wrote: post #13

Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork where you can do basically anything and the game will come back with something that's at least interesting. It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.

MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s Early 80's via BBSes, online services, and BBS networks like ARBnet. BBS play was slow, but it was so novel and compelling, you didn't care.

Those BBS games back in the day were only 1 or 2 people though because they required one to tie up a phone line to play and most home setups couldn't support more than a few nodes, at least until the 90s.

Re: 1977: Zork

#22

Post by the_af »

the_af wrote: post #2

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

And how could I forget!

    xyzzy

Re: 1977: Zork

#23

Post by chongli »

narrator wrote: post #13

Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork where you can do basically anything and the game will come back with something that's at least interesting. It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.

It’s amusing but it’s not a game. It will respond with something (often amusing) to any promos you write but there aren’t any rules to what you get back and there are no puzzles to solve.

Zork, on the other hand, is an actual game you can solve, complete with a scoring system.

Re: 1977: Zork

#24

Post by pugworthy »

As someone that first played Adventure on a teletype in 1976, I always seem to take affront to article titles implying Zork was there first.

In this case "50 years of text games" is the substack name, and this is just the entry for Zork in 1977.

See https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure for the real deal.

Re: 1977: Zork

#25

Post by [deleted] »

the_af wrote: post #2

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

[deleted]

Re: 1977: Zork

#26

Post by krumpet »

I'm still playing Zork (Planetfall, Enchanter, and Deadline too) and have been since the early 80s. Even though I've never solved them, they never fail to warm my heart. Along with my collection of dusty, hand drawn maps I journey onward! Thanks for the memories, Infocom.

Re: 1977: Zork

#27

Post by iainctduncan »

I often think I owe Infocom my career! I believe it was hugely valuable to have started hobby hacking at a young age, and Zork was what made we want to do it. Their language parser was just so cool. Like many of you I'm sure, a text adventure game was my final project in computer science at high school too. :-)

Re: 1977: Zork

#28

Post by iainctduncan »

pugworthy wrote: post #24

As someone that first played Adventure on a teletype in 1976, I always seem to take affront to article titles implying Zork was there first. In this case "50 years of text games" is the substack name, and this is just the entry for Zork in 1977. See https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure for the real deal.

True, but they really raised the bar with their parser!

Re: 1977: Zork

#30

Post by CobrastanJorji »

VadimPR wrote: post #29

If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them! (bias: I'm the project lead)

And don't forget that MUDs led to the wider field of "interactive fiction," which covers MUDs but also a bunch of other really fascinating ways of telling stories with interactive text. There are oodles of them at https://ifcomp.org/ and https://ifdb.tads.org/
Post reply on HN