Though type-in publication continued through the 1980s, the inherent limits on the length of such programs (only the most dedicated would tackle a type-in that was more than a few hundred lines long) and their reliance on the universality of BASIC (rather than more performant compiled languages) meant that their significance waned as the sophistication of the game market increased. While the various partners mulled what exactly to do with their new business, Blank and a fellow LCS alum, Joel Berez, figured out how to cram Zork onto a microcomputer: they cut the number of rooms and items in the game in half and removed all the features of MDL not needed for the game, creating an interpreter for a simpler language they called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL). > THE ZORKMID IS THE UNIT OF CURRENCY OF THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE.”) Along with VisiCalc and WordStar, Zork functioned not just as a piece of software that did something, but also as an existence proof (for the owner and for skeptical friends and family) that the microcomputer could be more than merely a toy version of a real computer.
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Published at: 2025-12-13 20:19:10
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