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itafroma
zork-mdl
OPEN SOURCE2015–2025
itafroma / zork-mdl

zork-mdl

Original MDL source code for MIT's version of Zork

2Distinct people
12Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
82GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Original MDL source code for MIT's version of Zork

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

After some experimentation, I hypothesized that there was a troll flag in Zork, and once I finally discovered the source code decades later, I found out there actually was,…

DonHopkins used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:24:48 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-02-15 10:24:13 UTC to 2025-05-10 10:14:33 UTC.

0123452015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

5 sources
Zork was implemented in a dialect of LISP called "MDL" aka "MIT Design Language" aka "Muddle" [1], which ZIL was based on. Here's the original MDL source code, that people should study in school, which reads like an epic poem about heroic adventures such as Beowulf! [2] I'd love for some academic egghead literary critic type to deconstruct [3] the Zork MDL source code, like Chaim Gingold deconstructed SimCity for their PhD thesis. [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) [2] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl [3] http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html [4] https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=ABS http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DNAvqvKsuLGih8dWz9feEjea...
In The Enduring Legacy of Zork
“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,” Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I wasn't even a Russian Spy! [1] Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game itself. At the time there were no passwords or anything but security through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours "TURIST Accounts" [2] to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words. Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce's NorthStar Horizon in Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step: 1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 [3] at 300 baud, typed "E" to get the banner, then "@L 134" to connect to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP/IP's v
Read the rest
ast 32 bit address space!) 2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH). 3) Try to log in with that name, like ":LOGIN A2DEH". 4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account. In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS's password was famously "RMS", after they forced everyone to use a password over his objections). 5) If it doesn't recognize your user name, it asks "Do you want to apply for an account?" Answer YES. When it asks "Why do you want to use the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10?" answer "Learning LISP." (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.) 6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and YP), and although you still can't log into DM directly, you could log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS). 7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless questions like "how to you set the value of a variable?"). 8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with "@L 70". 9) Log in as "URANUS" with password "RINGS". 10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the country [4] logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user name to your own with ":CHUNAME A2DEH". 11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially acceptable manner) on whoever's playing ZORK via ":OS PDL" (for "Output Spy Paul David Lebling"), or snooping around trying to find the Zork source code [5], which was well hidden. 12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin Minsky's home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal Turing Machine he implemented in TECO. [6] 13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a "nice private message" telling your they know what you're up to with ZORK, and that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because it's such a great language, instead of demanding you commit "seppuku" and "dumping you off the net and be done with it", you simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled dick [7] by whining about how the people who gave you a free account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start inquiring into its operations by seeing if your "Pentagon friends can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0 [2] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html [3] https://www.saildart.org/TIPS[P,DOC]3 [4] https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths [5] https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918 [7] http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html
In The Enduring Legacy of Zork
You're welcome, and thanks for checking out the code! Since releasing the X11/TCL/Tk version for OLPC, we've stripped out the user interface, cleaned up and refactored and doxygenated the city simulator engine code into C++, and wrapped it with SWIG so it plugs into Python and other scripting languages. It's not as "authentic", but it has more comments and is easier to read than the old C code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol... Here's a talk about it: HAR 2009 Lightning Talk Transcript: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity, by Don Hopkins http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Tran... I got hooked on computer games by playing Zork at MIT-DM, and it really blew my mind to finally be able to read the original Zork source code in MDL. Reading the source code takes you backstage behind
Read the rest
the scenes of a world you visited years ago, like the Disney's Keys to the Kingdom Tour! https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl
In Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM game from 1993

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