Ah, nostalgia… Before MMORPGs, before World of Warcraft… For those of you old enough to remember the halcyon days of the beginning of the microcomputing revolution, here is a short history of the Zork franchise.
June 10, 2007
mikescape
“I will worship toward Your holy temple, and praise Your name for Your lovingkindness and Your truth; for You have magnified Your Word above all Your name.” -Psalm 138:2
June 12, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Zork, I can’t believe that you put this in your blog. I played Zork on my IBM PC running DOS beginning in 1985, or so. Somebody gave me a bunch of bootleg programs for my PC and I was just learning how to use a computer, and I ran each of them. One of the disks was simply labeled “Zork.” I didn’t know it was a game but out of curiosity I ran the program from the 5 1/4″ drive and then next thing you know I was learning that it was a game and how to play it by nothing but experimentation. The interface was just single sentence text prompts, as I remember it, and somehow I began typing in simple commands like “Go left,” and many hours and days later I mastered the game, and all by experimentation. Now you know why I geek for a living, right?
Back in those days in Seattle I had a couple of friends that graduated from college with a software engineering degree of some sort and applied at this little start-up called “Microsoft.” The company didn’t offer much pay but gave you some stock option incentives. Ten years later they each retired, bought a nice house on a big lake somewhere and never had to work again.
June 15, 2007 at 4:07 am
I have to say Mike that I am a bit of nerd too. I remember playing Zork Nemesis and Grand Inquisistor. I love those games.
I love myst too. I am so stuck on one myst game though. I even have the walk through, but get so stuck.
I am so lame!
June 15, 2007 at 4:14 am
Oh… and I have to also confess that I am a trekie. I love Deep Space Nine and was so sad when it ended, I loved the politics of all the confederate planets.
I also love “The next Generation”, my favourite character was Data. He was kewl. And Q, he was funny.
Voyager was good too. I really like it when one of the crew experienced warp 10 which in theory places you everywhere at the same time. That really played with my head.
Love stuff like that…
Perhpas God is warp 10! God is so fast that He doesn’t move… the great unmover! Hmmmm