Yeah. In 1969, Bruce Daniels was a neighbor in my dorm (Random Hall, MIT) and 
Tim Anderson was working in the same office space at Project MAC as Carl Hewitt 
in around 1974, when I was, among other things like working on Multics kernel 
and building MACLISP, helping Carl with implementing Planner, and Tim started 
working on Zork soon after that. This was before the Apple II existed, it's 
worth remembering.
 
Something worth noting about this: the ONLY computer gaming worth anything at 
the time was being built by students in ARPA funded labs like MIT Project MAC, 
and Xerox PARC. Not ARPA funded games (those came much latter as battle 
simulators were interesting), but games were great for computer languages. In 
fact, the Planner effort was entangled with the Muddle language, which I think 
the Zork folks worked on with the folks working with Carl on Planner around 
that time.
 
The idea of a "packaged software product" really didn't happen until the Apple 
II started taking off (along with the TRS-80). There was no such thing, no such 
market. But what was really smart about the Zork guys was that they saw that 
opportunity for what it was, and started their company. And in some sense, they 
were the "killer app" for gaming (given the character displays of the early PCs 
like the Apple and Tandy machines). Just as Visicalc was the killer app for 
business. (Printers were so terrible that word processing had no real 
opportunity for business users, just for hobbyists, that came later with laser 
printers that became cheap). My point here is that there are folks who have 
something just about ready for a technology change, and thus they can, if 
smart, move first and define the industry that results.
 
On Friday, May 8, 2020 2:58am, "Dave Taht" <dave.t...@gmail.com> said:



> https://github.com/MITDDC/zork
> 
> I still haven't finished zork II. Had to reverse engineer zork 1 to win.
> 
> --
> Make Music, Not War
> 
> Dave Täht
> CTO, TekLibre, LLC
> http://www.teklibre.com
> Tel: 1-831-435-0729
> _______________________________________________
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> 
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