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I've always been fascinated by Zork despite coming of age decades after its release. Reminded of it a few years back through The Digital Antiquarian, I wrote a C# implementation of the Z-Machine (https://github.com/raegwolf/zmachine). Seeing how so much could be achieved with so little memory was eye opening.

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I wrote one in Haskell [1], ostensibly as a uni class project but also as a way to teach myself Haskell and have fun; I had the infrastructure in place and was trying to run Zork, implementing opcodes, one by one, when finally I saw the familiar message "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." The sense of accomplishment was rewarding and elating.

2004. Good times.

[1]: https://github.com/nathell/haze

I love Zork because I started learning English on it (forest being one of the first words, never could find "stiletto" in any dictionary I had!). At the same time we were all pirating punks in middle school who loved skipping copy protection or boosting stats in assembler, and Zork was one of the only games who completely baffled me, which I now know is because of the interpreter. Good times.

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