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1977: Zork
91–94 of 94 posts
Re: 1977: Zork
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Compuserve had a multi-player game called British Legends (also known as MUD 1) in the mid 80s. I very fondly remember paying $6.25 an hour to play at 300 baud. You can still play it here:
Re: 1977: Zork
#93One of the coolest technical aspects of early Infocom text adventure games is that most games weren't actually written using native assembly code for the platforms they ran on, and were instead compiled down to "z-code", a bytecode which ran on the "z-machine" virtual machine architecture. Z-machines are pretty niftly little bits of tech, as while they have a lot in common with regular 'ol machine code, the z-machine…
In my youth I used to use BCD to handle large numbers and mathematics, so bit/byte representations have always been of interest. In that regard, I really appreciated the Infocom text compression.
Use your favourite seach engine to look up ZSCII which, roughly, is three characters per two bytes (five bits each) with special markers to switch between three different 'alphabets' for what characters the ZSCII bits represent.
Edit: Coincidentally there's a British quiz show called Only Connect, and a few days ago one of the contestants offered xyzzy as an answer to a question where they had to provide the fourth entry in a sequence. The host had never heard of it, and expected a different answer, but it fit and they got the points.
Re: 1977: Zork
#94> You are in an open field west of a big white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. This reminds me of that hypnotic phrase from the 12 Monkeys tv series. Anyways, whatever happened to these types of games? Did it just die out as computers got more powerful, and everyone just played first-person shooters or 3d role playing games?
The games are still being made, and are very high quality.
Once every few years I go to http://xyzzyawards.org and play the winners.