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Zork is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for mainframe computers. Developed between 1977 and 1979 at MIT, and inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), it was split into three episodes for personal computers (PCs) by Infocom. In Zork, the player searches for treasure in the abandoned Great Underground Empire, moving between the game's hundreds of locations and interacting with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. Zork was a massive success, with sales increasing for years as the market for PCs expanded. The first episode sold over 38,000 copies in 1982, and around 150,000 copies in 1984. Infocom was purchased by Activision in 1986, leading to new Zork games beginning in 1987. Critics regard it as one of the greatest games ever and foundational to the adventure game genre. In 2007, the Library of Congress deemed Zork as one of the ten most important video games of all time. (Full article...)