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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."
"Zorch" sounds exactly like "Zork" when you pronounce the "-ch" as a "k" like the word chemistry. Could've been wordplay that became viral, like when people use "guise" instead of "guys".
The general definition of "zorch" is to destroy or render unusuable, esp with electrical current of improper or fatal voltage or current.
Calvin and Hobbes' Spaceman Spiff carries a futuristic sidearm, which was eventually named Death Ray Blaster, or Death Ray Zorcher.
Crappy ASCII art based shareware game... Kingdom of Kroz... "borrowed" it's name from Zork.
- Chuq
How about maybe it just sounded good?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
The oracle asks for a donation of 1000 zorkmids to ponder your question..
mod me funny
As a kid in the early '80s, I created my own space marine/spy/superhero character and drew a comic book of one of his adventures: lots of spaceships and weapons and a sinister villain as part of a class project. I named him Zork because I was fascinated by the letter Z (I was a huge Zorro fan growing up) and the combination with the letter K sounded strong. I had big hopes of making him into a toy product line, Saturday morning cartoon, and a series of choose your own adventure books. Oh well...
I swear that game made me buy a commodore 64 just to play it. I saw it on a friends C64 and bought one a week later with a 1541 disk drive and the games Zork and F15 Strike Eagle. I lost more sleep wandering around the rooms in that house. I doubt the name has any real meaning, just more of the same bizarreness of the game.
Hmm....reminds me of the movie Pitch Black. I wonder if the writers ever played Zork?
My lawn... get off of it. :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Obligatory nerdcore song. MC Frontalot- It is Pitch Dark
He can't. He is caught is a twisty little maze of bushes all alike. And you smell suspiciously like a grue....
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
An hour of searching revealed these clues to the origin of the classic gaming name Zork. Here's a 2001 interview with Dave Lebling, one of the devs from Zork and the early days of Infocom posted on Adventure Gaming Classic http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/171/:
Q: There had been numerous speculations regarding the origin of the word "Zork." For the record, who among the "Infocom Imps" came up with this name? Where is the exact origin of the word "Zork"?
A: I'm pretty sure it was Marc Blank who first applied the word to the game. The word itself was current as an exclamation or nonsense word (like "foo" and "bar") around the lab. Programs in the ITS operating system were had to have six-letter or fewer names, and it was pretty common to use a placeholder name when working on something new. I think Marc used "TS ZORK" as the placeholder, and it stuck.
I think "Frobozz" was similar, of a variant of "foobar." Bruce Daniels was, I think, largely responsible for its ubiquity in the early parts of Zork.
We briefly changed the name of the game to "Dungeon" (which was my bad idea, I sheepishly admit), then changed it back after TSR (the D&D people) threatened us with a lawsuit over it. MIT's lawyers squashed them like bugs but we decided we liked "Zork" better anyway. The widely distributed Fortran version of Zork was written during the period when the game was called Dungeon, which is why that version is often called Dungeon.
Also here's a further clue in "The History of Zork", as recounted by Tim Anderson http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html:
"...Marc, Bruce, and I sat down to write a real game. We began by drawing some maps, inventing some problems, and arguing a lot about how to make things work. Bruce still had some thoughts of graduating, thus preferring design to implementation, so Marc and I spent the rest of Dave's vacation in the terminal room implementing the first version of Zork. Zork, by the way, was never really named. "Zork" was a nonsense word floating around; it was usually a verb, as in "zork the fweep," and may have been derived from "zorch." ("Zorch" is another nonsense word implying total destruction.) We tended to name our programs with the word "zork" until they were ready to be installed on the system."
Anyone got the email address for Marc Blank? Undoubtedly the absolute truth lies with him.
An entire chapter of Twisty Little Passages is devoted to Zork. Twisty Little passages
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