Top 10 Games of 1980 | Number 4: Zork I #shorts

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. It was expanded by the original developers and others as Infocom and split 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 variety of personal computers beginning in 1980.

In the game, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasures. The game is composed of hundreds of areas, and the player moves between these areas and interacts with objects in them by typing commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.