Magical Mystery Tour

It is a story as old as time.  You meet, slightly wary of the unknown, but the uneasiness wears off and you are hooked.  You are inseparable, spend all your available time together, and think about the experience when you are alone.  Life goes on, things change, your interest diverges, and in the blink of an eye a quarter of a century has passed.  Then one day, you stumble upon your old friend, and it is as if no time has passed whatsoever. 

This may not so easy for those of us with greying hair or a few extra wrinkles.  It is, however, much simpler for a computer program, because, well, no time has passed. 

That's right.  It is pitch dark and I am likely to be eaten by a grue.

One of the items that came with my Associated Student fees at UC Davis (go Ags!) was access to the mainframe computer.  Each quarter provided a certain number of hours of computer time.  Keep in mind this was in the days of punch cards, CRTs and Commodore 64, so mainframe access was the 1983 version of leading edge gaming computers like the CyberPower Black Pearl or the Velocity Raptor Signature Edition.  Just without graphics, sound, a mouse or a few dozen other things.

At that time, UCD had Unix machines in a cluster.  Each was named after one of the Marx Brothers: Chico, Groucho, Harpo and Zeppo (Gummo and Mannie were apparently less computer savvy).  Logging onto Groucho (or one of his brothers) would take us to a games area, filled with the wonders of interactive typing.
 
The first game we found was Zork, one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games.  The authors were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group, the forebears of a company named Infocom that brought forth numerous games before being bought up by Activision.  Zork was a single player game, so it was just you and the challenge of the dungeon. 

Zork created a wondrous, magical realm, a feast for the imagination.  You have stumbled upon the ancient ruins of a vast empire lying far underground.  There are strange rooms to explore, a temple where some prayers are answered, a coal mine, a river with a waterfall and the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And all through typing, much like this:

The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room.

Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
The troll swings his axe, but it misses.

>swing sword
Whoosh!
The troll swings, you parry, but the force of his blow knocks your sword away.

>get sword
Taken.

The troll hits you with a glancing blow, and you are momentarily stunned.

>kill troll with sword
You charge, but the troll jumps nimbly aside.
The axe gets you right in the side. Ouch!

>kill troll with sword
The troll is staggered, and drops to his knees.
The troll slowly regains his feet.

>kill troll with sword
The fatal blow strikes the troll square in the heart: He dies.
Almost as soon as the troll breathes his last breath, a cloud of sinister black fog envelops him, and when the fog lifts, the carcass has disappeared. Your sword is no longer glowing.

In the days before graphics, computer games enticed players with a well-turned phrase, delighting players with clever writing and tearing their hair out with difficult puzzles.  Rightly so, the creators of Zork will be honored this February with a Pioneer Award at the D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit, an annual multi-day gathering of video game executives.  Perhaps by then I will have remembered how to enter the crypt and finish the game.