Gamasutra has a new retrospective on “Zork“, a.k.a. “Dungeon”, a text-based computer game written for the PDP-10 back in the late 70s. Infocom’s long gone, but the Z-machine interpreters mentioned in the article live on. OS X users will probably want to grab the latest version of Zoom, a nice Z-machine interpreter for OS X.
After you get that, you’ll need to find the Interactive Fiction archive and there, you want the z-code archive. Scroll to the bottom of that page, and download “zdungeon.z5” (or just download the link here). Drop that onto your new Zoom icon or double-click it and you’re off and running. Adventurers never had it so good!
In addition to the IF archive, which suffers from a glut of too many mediocre games, Zarf’s a frequent winner of the yearly Interactive Fiction contest and his web pages serve as a nice introduction to the current genre. (Note: Zarf’s page above is outdated. He’d recommend running Zoom these days. His MaxZip interpreter was written for pre-OS X Macs; it’s ancient history now.) His games are the “Download Z-code game file” links. Just download any of these and double-click them to play.
If you get stuck, there’s maps of Dungeon here and here. These are from the DEC Professional Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1982.
Update: more on “Adventure” and the Colossal Cave system in Kentucky.
