Zarf Updates

I tried to give this post an eye-catching title like "The Power of Indentation!" But my fingers wouldn't have it. Blame the fingers.

I don't know much about the text-editing tools used at Infocom. The Witness source directory includes a tantalizing mention of TECO, an editor used at MIT in the 1960s and 70s. Going back a couple of years, there's a map file in the 1978 MDL Zork repository which seems to about managing TECO keybindings.

TECO's editing macros later evolved into their own editor, naturally called "Emacs". Wikipedia notes:

By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science.

It seems certain that Infocom folks used Emacs at some point, but I don't have any evidence about when.

Whatever editor they used, we can ask: Did it auto-indent their ZIL code? The ZIL code we have is very consistently indented, so it seems like a good bet, but I don't know for sure. The only reference in the 1989 ZIL manual is:

Also note the spaces at the beginning of the TELLs in the DESCFCN. If your describers are of the indentation flavor, your DESCFCN must supply its own indentation.

"Describers" are explained as:

[...] a small package of programs which handle the descriptions for the player's environment: current room and visible objects.

...Which is interesting, not least for saying "programs" for what we (and ZIL itself!) call "routines". I think that "indentation flavor" is not about source code indentation, but rather the indented style of object listing:

Sitting on the kitchen table is: 
  A brown sack
  The brown sack contains:
    A glass bottle
    The glass bottle contains:
      A quantity of water
    A clove of garlic

Some Infocom games used a more sentence-like listing format, particular if they were less container-heavy.

But I digress. Let's go back to the source code.

Borneo, 1941: rich white Brits run the show for tobacco, pearls and the opium trade, while World War Two creeps up around the edges. Who is sneaking onto the Goodwill plantation and why?

The Red Pearls of Borneo (Bushmonkey Games) is an interesting take on the deductionizer format. It's patterned after Type Help; your challenge is to figure out which people were where and when. But it adds a layer of search mechanics to the logic. I don't think it's entirely successful, but it's an instructive try.

As promised, the latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Starcross!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

This was a fun one to work on. Infocom tackled the idea of epic sci-fi with verve, if not absolute originality. (Even at age 13, I thought "Huh, the author must have read Rendezvous with Rama.") The alien beings you discover are set-pieces, but each one is a cameo-sized micro-story within the spacecraft's long journey. An early example of we'd call "environmental storytelling" these days.

As it happens, I never owned a copy of Starcross. I bought a copy -- for a friend's bar mitzvah, with the shameless intention of immediately pirating it back for myself. (Don't worry, I traded him all my Zorks.) This means I do not have the treasured flying-saucer package, nor the wonderful mass detector chart (printed in un-Xeroxable purple and orange on silver paper).

But don't worry; I've redrawn that chart for your pleasure:

If you want to see photographs of the original map and packaging, visit the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.

As for the in-game map display, I'll leave that as a surprise. Suffice it to say that the interior of a cylindrical space station was an entertaining mapping challenge.

By the way, this is the first known release of Starcross (release 15). Normally I prefer to use the Masterpieces release of each game for the Visible Zorker project. For Starcross that would be release 17. However, we don't have source code for r17, so I had to go back to r15 for this exhibit.

More readings on Starcross:

• The Digital Antiquarian
• Drew Cook
• Jason Dyer

And, as a bonus:

• Walkthrough by David Welbourn (just released this week!)

Upcoming work:

Visible Suspended will be the next public release on August 1st. Watch for robots!

Patreon supporters got access to Visible Suspended a month ago, and The Visible Witness today. Please remember that the Visible Zorker is a Patreon-supported project! Your donation is immensely appreciated. (And credited in each game's "About" page, of course.)

For the record, NarraScope in Albany went great.

See you next month!

I have no hot take, but I did post this last year:

Another Valve hardware announcement: the Steam Machine is back. I am immediately and predictably on board for it.

-- me, November 2025

So I owe you a followup post, which is, TLDR: "too rich for my blood."

Last month I saw a reference to the "You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam":

This is a game jam for games that do not exist. They won't ever exist. They will never be playable. They will suggest a game, create a space in which it seems like a game could exist, but where there is none. It might make someone wish that it were an actual, real, game, and may even inspire them to create one, but will never itself be a game.

-- Jam overview, Michelle Jones

That sounds like fun! I thought. So I put together a quickie.

The Aeonic Nebular Character Generator (downloadable PDF file)

Prepare your character for sci-fi roleplaying!

In the Aeonic ruleset, it is not, strictly speaking, possible to die during character generation.

(And now you know what classic TTRPG I am riffing on. Well, one of them. The title is a nod to Æon, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.)

I hope it is amusing. And by all means take a look at the other 98 jam entries as well. People had lot of fun with this idea.

Not a Monty Python reference (unless you really want one), but rather: it's still spring (barely) and here's some games that surprised me. They popped up suddenly out of nowhere; I hadn't heard much about them; I enjoyed 'em.

(Okay, 7th Guest was announced a couple of months ago, and in fact has existed for three years in VR. Still, in the span of 1993 to now, that's sudden.)

Have some brief commentary, plus one design rumination.

• The Archives of Trevosa
• Hypogea
• The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

I posted a couple of weeks ago about Infocom tie-in novels, with a bit of a digression on the work of George Alec Effinger. It turns out that I have a response from Effinger to relay!

Not a response to my 2026 post, obviously. Effinger passed away in 2002. But his books were mentioned on Usenet in 1997. It was a thread about the "Groundhog Day" trope, which brought up Effinger's books The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time. (The first Effinger that I read, as it happens.)

Anyhow, someone made a rather dismissive comment to the effect of "...before Mr. Effinger ran out of ideas and was reduced to writing things like 'The Zork Chronicles'." And guess who showed up to riposte?

Welcome to June. The latest from the Visible Zorker project: Visible Deadline!

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

Deadline was Infocom's first non-Zork game, and they pulled out all the stops to make it feel like a new and different thing. Which made my job a lot more interesting!

A musical city, a record store, and a 90s soundtrack album! Okay, and a Lovecraftian adventure game.

• Phonopolis
• Wax Heads
• Mixtape
• Call of the Elder Gods

Now that I think about it, the Lovecraftian adventure has a puzzle where you control alien technology through musical resonance. See. It all fits.

Last week someone passed around a link to a post: "Classic Zork Novels, Now in E-book Format!"

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

• The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey
• The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger
• Enchanter by Robin W Bailey
• Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

-- PaulloDEC, May 13th

See the post for download links. PaulloDEC has now followed up with downloads of the four Zork-themed gamebooks.

So, this is convenient. These aren't rare books. As the post says, you can easily find scans of them (e.g. here). The used paperbacks are also not too hard to track down. I have Wishbringer and The Zork Chronicles on my shelves. But .epub files are easier to tote around.

The post got me looking at the books again, though. They're rather puzzling artifacts.