Frequently-Asked Questions

Who are Dungeon's Authors?

Dungeon is an emulation of the seminal Dungeon / Zork World from the 1977. It runs on the TriadCity World platform; but the World which players interact with and its laws of physics were originated by these four hackers of the Dynamic Modeling Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science:

• Tim Anderson
• Marc Blanc
• Bruce Daniels
• Dave Lebling

In subsequent years there were many ports and adaptations made by hackers, mostly at university CS departments. Best-known was Infocom's commercial release Zork. As a young hacker at the University of New Mexico, SmartMonsters' co-founder Gary Smith ported a pre-Infocom version from MDL to C, considerably enhancing the parser and the game world based on his observations of player behavior.

Our emulation follows the earliest versions we could find, C ports dated 1987 and 1991. These have many differences from Infocom's commercial Zork series.

We plan to bring Gary's enhanced evolution online some time in 2020, perhaps fully-updated to the far richer TriadCity platform. We'll let you know.

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