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Bit of a Friday Geek Out post – I have been a long time fan of adventure games and remember playing text based games in my early years such as “The Hobbit”, which I would play for many hours navigating the paths and challenges along the journey. A long way from todays computer games, but at the time was brilliant and this is probably what led me on my journey into D&D.
Another text based adventure game is Zork for which Microsoft have released the source code on GitHub for everyone to learn from, see how it was coded and hopefully inspire the next generation of coders.
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. Source: Wikipedia
The Microsoft post gives instruction on how to run Zork should you fancy a step back in time and enjoy a text based adventure.
Other Historical Code
There are lots of other historical titles in the GitHub repo that have been made available – https://github.com/historicalsource such as:
- Kings Quest
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
- Millipede
I will let you discover the rest.
Zork GitHub Repos
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire
Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz
Further Reading
Preserving code that shaped generations: Zork I, II, and III go Open Source
Max Hemingway 