Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling will give a one-hour postmortem of the classic text adventure Zork at this year’s Game Developers Conference.
You probably haven’t played Zork but you’ve almost certainly heard of the Great Underground Empire, a dangerous ruin packed with grues who are likely to eat you. Originally released in 1977, Zork was a tremendously influential game and set Infocom on the path to becoming one of the big names of the early video game industry.
To celebrate that great 1977 subterranean adventure, co-creator Dave Lebling will provide a one-hour “Classic Game Postmortem” of Zork at the upcoming GDC. He’ll talk about the development of both the mainframe and the microcomputer versions of the game, as well as the challenges of creating the advanced text parser it used and “the glory days of DIY publishing,” when games were often sold in ziplock bags.
The 2014 Game Developers Conference runs from March 17 to 21 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And if you happen to want to give Zork a try (and you really should), you may do so for free at THC.net.
