Zork

Zork is a text adventure and one of the foundations of the entire genre. There are no graphics; you play by typing commands, and the game answers with a description of the place you are standing in. The underground world has to be assembled in your head out of what you read.

The catalogue lists Commodore 64 as the platform and gives no year at all. Historically Zork began on mainframe computers in the seventies and only reached home machines in the following decade, so a C64 version is a later conversion of that original text. The missing year is a gap in the record rather than a date to rely on.

The parser is what made this family of games remarkable. Players type more than terse commands - whole sentences are understood better than was usual at the time, and that changes the feel of play entirely. Instead of picking from a menu you try to phrase what you want to do.

This is also why text adventures survived the arrival of graphics as a genre in their own right. A description conjures a scene no period computer could have drawn, and the puzzles reward thinking rather than reflexes.

Zork also arrived with a commercial idea attached. Infocom, the company that published it for home machines, sold its games as literary objects: printed materials came in the box, the writing was edited rather than merely typed, and the parser was advertised as the product. That positioning is why text adventures kept a serious reputation while graphics took over everywhere else.

OldGame.cz loads Zork straight into a browser window, so the first command can be typed as soon as the page finishes loading.