A recent email exchange with a curious student that brought back memories. Posted without further comment.
Subject: Zork
Are you fimilar with this text based video game of the 80s? If so can you explain to me how it was made, programming-wise?
OMG definitely. Spent many hours solving Zork 2 and/or 3, many of them with my high school buddy in the office of our chemistry teacher, who was also a fan.
I really don't know much about how they were programmed, although I did try to reproduce some of the basic ideas on my own. There were some listings in magazines of programs in BASIC that implemented simpler text adventures, I might have just modified those.
Here's a reference to one from Wikipedia:
Pirate Adventure, was an original game in a similar style to Adventure—its source code, written in BASIC, was published in the December 1980 issue of Byte magazine.[41][44]
but I can't find the article online.
