Currently Activision is reportedly being purchased by Microsoft. When I heard this it caused me to think of a smaller company that Activision had purchased several decades ago.
around 1986 I first played the commercial version of the first kind of multiplayer online game, an “interactive fiction” text puzzle game formerly hosted on the Arpanet. It would be almost a decde before the public internet, the World Wide Web released at Cern 5 years later, would be available more widely in homes and earlier BBS systems generally worked on snail slow dial-up modem tied to the main phone line in everyone in your household’s life.
No longer playable in multiplayer, confined to local machine memory, the name of the game was Zork and the goal would be to fill a treasure case with the lost treasures of a Great Underground Empire which had been ruled by a series of parodied cultural and technological giants who were known as the “Flathead” dynasty. The story of their dynasty would flesh itself out over the course of 5 or 6 additional games and 40 years of cult fandom.
the wiki for the game:
“The game was Zork is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
The original game, developed between 1977 and 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), the first well-known example of interactive fiction and the first well-known adventure game. The developers wanted to make a similar game that was able to understand more complicated sentences than Adventure's two-word commands. In 1979, they founded Infocom with several other colleagues at the MIT computer center. Blank and Joel Berez created a way to run a smaller portion of Zork on several brands of microcomputer, letting them commercialize the game as Infocom's first products. The first episode was published by Personal Software in 1980, after which Infocom purchased back the rights and self-published all three episodes beginning in late 1981.”
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There are playable versions of the original online and even one perfectly playable version that is hosted on the framework for what was the arpanet (though I’ve yet to bump into any other player, ever). The versions are serialized, some releases are said to contain content not available in earlier versions though after some tests I’ve yet to find one piece of content changed aside from the documentation and licensing letter in the mailbox in the very first scene. (which is also how you know which version of the game you are playing and whether it is the arpanet hosted release or abandonware commercial or promotional activision. Learning to physically map a game on paper as you play online can be confusing but if you haven’t experienced one of these types of word puzzles I suggest giving one a try and refusing to put it down.