The Murky Origins of Zork's Name

mjn writes "Computational media researcher Nick Montfort traces the murky origins of Zork's name. It's well known that the word was used in MIT hacker jargon around that time, but how did it get there? Candidates are the term 'zorch' from late 1950s DIY electronics slang, the use of the term as a placeholder in some early 1970s textbooks, the typo a QWERTY user would get if he typed 'work' on an AZERTY keyboard, and several uses in obscure sci-fi. No solid answers so far, though, as there are problems with many of the possible explanations that would have made MIT hackers unlikely to have run across them at the right time."

Comments

Re:What about Kroz?

[Osty]

Crappy ASCII art based shareware game... Kingdom of Kroz... "borrowed" it's name from Zork.

Crappy or not, Kroz ultimately brought us Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, etc. Scott Miller founded Apogee with the release of Kingdom of Kroz, and the rest is history.

Re:I didn't say 'zork'.

[GaryOlson]

He can't. He is caught is a twisty little maze of bushes all alike. And you smell suspiciously like a grue....