ZORK.. the beginning

starlight777

starlight777

Zork Rules
Sep 12, 2013
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gaming had a beginning, Zork was the start of adventure games as an example

Zork: The Great Underground Empire - Part I, later known as Zork I, is an interactive fiction video game written by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels and Tim Anderson and published by Infocom in 1980. It was the first game in the popular Zork trilogy and was released for a wide range of computer systems, followed by Zork II and Zork III. It was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986
an example of life before graphics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_I

The opening text of Zork I is among the most notable descriptions in video games:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
This is quite simplistic when compared to Infocom's later games, many of which started with screens full of introductory text.
Several of the game's situations and descriptions have become iconic within the field of interactive fiction, such as the brass lantern and the "Elvish sword of great antiquity".
Zork I also introduced the notable grue, a "sinister, lurking presence" who kills adventurers who go exploring in the dark. Grues appeared (or, at least, were mentioned) in many subsequent Infocom adventures, right up to the 1997 graphic adventure Zork Grand Inquisitor, published by Activision.
 
In 1949–1950, Charley Adama created a "Bouncing Ball" program for MIT's Whirlwind computer. While the program was not yet interactive, it was a precursor to games soon to come.


In February 1951, Christopher Strachey tried to run a draughts (checkers) program he had written for the Pilot ACE. The program exceeded the memory capacity of the machine and Strachey recoded his program for a machine at Manchester with a larger memory capacity by October


In 1959–1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 machine at MIT:
  • Mouse in the Maze: allowed players to place maze walls, bits of cheese, and, in some versions, martinis using a light pen. One could then release the mouse and watch it traverse the maze to find the goodies
  • HAX: By adjusting two switches on the console, various graphical displays and sounds could be made.
  • Tic-Tac-Toe: Using the light pen, the user could play a simple game of tic-tac-toe against the computer.

  • In September 1971, Galaxy Game was installed at Stanford University. Based on Spacewar!, this was the first coin-operated video game. Only one was built, using a DEC PDP-11 and vector display terminals. In 1972 it was expanded to be able to handle four to eight consoles.
 
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First generation consoles (1972–1977)
The system was released in the USA in 1972 by Magnavox, called the Magnavox Odyssey.


A number of noteworthy games were also written for Hewlett-Packard minicomputers such as the HP2000.


1975: William Crowther wrote the first modern text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT, and later Colossal Cave).


1975: Daglow, then a student at Claremont Graduate University, wrote the first role-playing video game on PDP-10 mainframes: Dungeon. The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Although displayed in text, it was the first game to use line of sight graphics, as the top-down dungeon maps showing the areas that the party had seen or could see took into consideration factors such as light or darkness and the differences in vision between species.

1976: The earliest role-playing video games to use elements from Dungeons & Dragons are Telengard, written in 1976, and Zork (later renamed Dungeon), written in 1977


1978: Multi-User Dungeon, the first MUD, was created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, beginning the heritage that culminates with today's MMORPGs.


Video game crash of 1977

The crash eventually came to an end with the success of Taito's Space Invaders, released in 1978, sparking a renaissance for the video game industry and paving the way for the golden age of arcade video games


The success of the Atari 2600 in turn revived the home video game market, up until the North American video game crash of 1983.
 
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Second generation consoles (1977–1983)

However video game production was still a niche skill. Warren Robinett, the famous programmer of the game Adventure, spoke on developing games: "In those old far-off days, each game for the 2600 was done entirely by one person, the programmer, who conceived the game concept, wrote the program, did the graphics—drawn first on graph paper and converted by hand to hexadecimal—and did the sounds

Three machines dominated the second generation of consoles in North America, far outselling their rivals:

The Video Computer System (VCS) ROM cartridge-based console, later renamed the Atari 2600, was released in 1977 by Atari

The Intellivision, introduced by Mattel in 1980

The ColecoVision, an even more powerful machine, appeared in 1982.

In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers "who realized that the games they had anonymously programmed on their $20K salaries were responsible for 60 percent of the company's $100 million in cartridge sales for one year".
It was the first third-party developer of video games. By 1982, approximately 8 million American homes owned a video game console, and the home video game industry was generating an annual revenue of $3.8 billion, which was nearly half the $8 billion revenue in quarters generated from the arcade video game industry at the time.
 
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Golden age of video arcade games (1978–1986)
By 1981, the arcade video game industry was generating an annual revenue of $5 billion in North America
equivalent to $12.3 billion in 2011
In 1982, the arcade video game industry reached its peak, generating $8 billion in quarters,
equivalent to over $18.5 billion in 2011,
surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined at that time.
This was also nearly twice as much revenue as the $3.8 billion generated by the home video game industry that same year; both the arcade and home markets combined add up to a total revenue of $11.8 billion for the video game industry in 1982
equivalent to over $27.3 billion in 2011.
The arcade video game industry would continue to generate an annual revenue of $5 billion in quarters through to 1985
 
Home computer games (late 1970s–early 1980s)

While the fruit of retail development in early video games appeared mainly in video arcades and home consoles, home computers began appearing in the late 1970s and were rapidly evolving in the 1980s, allowing their owners to program simple games. Hobbyist groups for the new computers soon formed and PC game software followed.


The video games industry experienced its first major growing pains in the early 1980s as publishing houses appeared, with many honest businesses—occasionally surviving at least 20 years, such as Electronic Arts—alongside fly-by-night operations that cheated the games' developers. While some early 1980s games were simple clones of existing arcade titles, the relatively low publishing costs for personal computer games allowed for bold, unique games.


Gaming computers
Following the success of the Apple II and Commodore PET in the late 1970s, a series of cheaper and incompatible rivals emerged in the early 1980s. This second batch included the Commodore VIC-20 and 64; Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum; NEC PC-8000, PC-6001, PC-88 and PC-98; Sharp X1 and X68000; and Atari 8-bit family, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC, and MSX series. These rivals helped to catalyze both the Home computer and Games markets, by raising awareness of computing and gaming through their competing advertising campaigns.


In 1984, the computer gaming market took over from the console market following the crash of that year; computers offered equal gaming ability and, since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles.
 
Early online gaming
Dial-up bulletin board systems were popular in the 1980s, and sometimes used for online game playing. The earliest such systems were in the late 1970s and early 1980s and had a crude plain-text interface. Later systems made use of terminal-control codes (the so-called ANSI art, which included the use of IBM-PC-specific characters not part of an ANSI standard) to get a pseudo-graphical interface. Some BBSs offered access to various games which were playable through such an interface, ranging from text adventures to gambling games like blackjack (generally played for "points" rather than real money). On some multiuser BBSs (where more than one person could be online at once), there were games allowing users to interact with one another.

Video game crash of 1983
At the end of 1983, the industry experienced losses more severe than the 1977 crash. This was the "crash" of the video game industry, as well as the bankruptcy of several companies that produced North American home computers and video game consoles from late 1983 to early 1984. It brought an end to what is considered to be the second generation of console video gaming. Causes of the crash include the production of poorly designed games, an immature distribution system which left retail stuck with unsold copies to discount, as well as a general thought among retail that video games were just another toy fad and that home computers were the next big thing


Third generation consoles (1983–1995) (8-bit)
In 1985, the American Video Game Console market was revived with Nintendo’s release of its 8-bit console, the Famicom (a contraction of "Family Computer"), known outside Asia as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

Other markets were not as heavily dominated by Nintendo, because of heavy competition from PC's like the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 preventing the NES having much success in Europe, or lack of marketing, allowing other consoles to find an audience like the Master System in Australia and Brazil (the Master System was sold in North America as well, but was less successful).

In the new consoles, the gamepad or joypad, took over for joysticks, paddles, and keypads as the default game controller included with the system. The gamepad design of an 8 direction Directional-pad (or D-pad for short) with 2 or more action buttons became the standard. This generation also marked a shift in the dominance of home video game console and game production from the United States to Japan

This generation ended with the discontinuation of the NES in 1995.
 
The 1990s were a decade of marked innovation in video gaming. It was a decade of transition from raster graphics to 3D graphics and gave rise to several genres of video games including first-person shooter, real-time strategy, and MMO. Handheld gaming began to become more popular throughout the decade, thanks in part to the release of the Game Boy in 1989.[99] Arcade games, although still relatively popular in the early 1990s, begin a decline as home consoles became more common.


The video game industry matured into a mainstream form of entertainment in the 1990s. Major developments of the 1990s included the beginning of a larger consolidation of publishers, higher budget games, increased size of production teams and collaborations with both the music and motion picture industries


The increasing computing power and decreasing cost of processors such as the Intel 80386, Intel 80486, and the Motorola 68030, caused the rise of 3D graphics, as well as "multimedia" capabilities through sound cards and CD-ROMs. Early 3D games began with flat-shaded graphics (Elite, Starglider 2 or Alpha Waves[100]), and then simple forms of texture mapping (Wolfenstein 3D).


Id Software’s 1996 game Quake pioneered play over the Internet in first-person shooters. Internet multiplayer capability became a de facto requirement in almost all FPS games


Fourth generation consoles (1988–1999) (16-bit)
The Mega Drive/Genesis proved its worth early on after its debut in 1988. Nintendo responded with its own next generation system known as the Super NES (SNES) in 1990. The TurboGrafx-16 (1987) debuted early on alongside the Genesis, but unlike in Japan it did not achieve a large following in the USA due to a limited library of games and excessive distribution restrictions imposed by Hudson.


Fifth generation consoles (1993–2006) (32 and 64-bit)
In 1993, Atari re-entered the home console market with the introduction of the Atari Jaguar. Also in 1993, The 3DO Company released the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, which, though highly advertised and promoted, failed to catch up to the sales of the Jaguar, due to its high pricetag. Both consoles had very low sales and few quality games, eventually leading to their demise. In 1994, three new consoles were released in Japan: the Sega Saturn, the Sony PlayStation, and the PC-FX, the Saturn and the PlayStation later seeing release in North America in 1995. The PlayStation quickly outsold all of its competitors mainly on the strength of its available titles, with the exception of the aging Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which still had the support of many major game companies.


Sixth generation consoles (1998–2013)
In the sixth generation of video game consoles, Sega exited the hardware market, Nintendo fell behind, Sony solidified its lead in the industry, and Microsoft developed a gaming console.

Return of alternative controllers
One significant feature of this generation was various manufacturers' renewed fondness for add-on peripheral controllers.

Online gaming rises to prominence

Seventh generation consoles (2005 – present)
The generation opened early for handheld consoles
In console gaming, Microsoft stepped forward first in November 2005 with the Xbox 360, and Sony followed in 2006 with the PlayStation 3, released in Europe in March 2007


Setting the technology standard for the generation, both featured high-definition graphics over HDMI connections, large hard disk-based secondary storage for save games and downloaded content, integrated networking, and a companion on-line gameplay and sales platform, with Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, respectively. Both were formidable systems that were the first to challenge personal computers in power (at launch) while offering a relatively modest price compared to them. While both were more expensive than most past consoles

Eighth generation consoles (2011–present)
The Wii U is a video game console from Nintendo
The PlayStation 4 (or PS4) is an upcoming video game console from Sony Computer Entertainment.
The Xbox One is an upcoming video game console from Microsoft
Ouya is an android based console that was released in mid 2013, costing $99 USD.

Steambox.. when ever that comes out
 
This thread just reminded me of playing Q2 then getting a phone bill from BT £987 for 1 month argh was on a 56k modem at the time. Wtf
 
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Zork was cool. On a semi-related note, I think it's available to play online for free somewhere - all I can really remember is that there's an archive of interactive fiction somewhere, but I don't remember the link and I'm loathe to click on what's coming up with a quick google search.
 
I thought it was very cool when Zork was included with the first Black Ops game as one of the many easter eggs. It's part of the reason why it's my favorite Call of Duty.
 
My big brother had Zork for C-64 but I barely remember playing it. I did played a bit of Grand Inquisitor way back in the day. But I don't remember much about it.
 
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