Zork was one of the first and most popular text adventures. Here is a video

You can watch it all if you want, but you’re only expected to watch the first 10/20/30 minutes. Keep these questions in mind as you watch and then stop the video to write down the answers. Send the answers to me by email or private message on Discord.

Level One

  1. Zork was made at a place called ‘MIT’. Search for it on Google. What do the initials MIT stand for? In which country is it?

  2. Watch first ten minutes of the video (up to 10:00).

  3. What were some games made before Zork (at MIT)?

  4. What were some monsters in the game Zork?

Level Two

  1. Watch the next ten minutes of the video (up to 20:00).

  2. Approximately how many rooms did Zork have on its map?

  3. What was the name of the company created to sell Zork?

  4. Zork was made on a mainframe computer called a PDP-10. Later it was made for microcomputers so people could play it at home. Why was it difficult to get it to work on microcomputers when it was already working on the mainframe?

Level Three

  1. Some of the slides were about part of the Zork program called the parser. What do you guess a parser might do?

  2. Watch the next ten minutes of the video (up to 30:00).

  3. What language was the code for Zork (microcomputer version) written in? What reasons can you think of for using this language instead of Python?

  4. Play Zork on this website for 5 minutes. It is very difficult so don’t worry if you get stuck! More modern text adventures are easier than Zork.

Click here for a card to print out that will help you

How far did you get in Zork?