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"You are standing in a field west of a white house..." Local Infocom Parser



Thats how it started. Funny how that phrase shaped what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't know it at the time, but it's easy to see looking back.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, thats the opening line of the classic text adventure Zork. Although, when I first adventured into the white house and down into the Great Underground Empire, it had not reached its commecial form and was called Dungeon, floating around the big DEC mainframes. I had a friend in 1979 whose dad worked for DEC. Personal computers were still a year or two away and his dad would bring home a dumb terminal (literally a keyboard and a green screen monitor with a 300 baud modem)to use in the evenings to login from home and work. If there was time when he was done, he would let us get on and show us some of the "games" we could play. Eliza, they Psychic, the Star Trek simulator, the old standby Lunar Lander simulation etc. We would spend HOURS playing the crude games. I was fascinated, I wanted to be involved in this somehow. This would be such a COOL career.

It was set it stone the evening we typed DUNGEO into the command prompt. Your standing in an open field and a blinking command prompt. You then typed commnand such as, GO EAST, GET SWORD etc. sounds way to simple doesn't it. But the vivid descriptions of the places you went (Who can forget Flood Control Dam #3?) and the creatures you came across were amazing. No graphics, none. Text only. Now im not going to be stupid and say the Dungeon was more fun than a Battlefield 2 fragfest, it can't comare to the offerings found on a PC now. But at that time, that place, there was nothing more fascinating.

A year or two later the home PC market began to boom, and I got my first PC, the good ol' Atari 800. The first game that I purchased, in a cheap looking blister pack, with very, NON professional art was a game from a new start up called Infocom. The game was Zork, and I was home again.

My entire professional career (minus the 2 years during High School at Famous Ramos Hot Dog stand) i have been involved with computers in some way or another. And it can all be traced back to that darkened room and glowing green cursor in 1979.

If you have never experienced a text adventure, there are still a group of devoted people creating new text adventures for todays PC's. Now its called Interactive Fiction and a great starting point is at The Brass Lantern. Give it a try. You won't be sorry.

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