Parchment and the Z-Machine

If you’re old enough to remember Zork, or perhaps have just heard of this ancient ancestor of today’s gaming scene, this site might be amusing to you:

http://parchment.toolness.com

The brilliant fellow over at toolness.com has created an interface called Parchment that allows you to relive old text-based adventure games.

“A few weeks ago, I started a small project to create a user interface for something called a Z-Machine: a virtual machine created by Infocom in the late 1970’s to run their text adventure games—the most famous among them being Zork, which is apparently what the ‘Z’ in Z-Machine stands for. These games, as their name suggests, are completely text-based; Infocom’s 1984 masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance for instance, opens with this passage: You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't. It is pitch black.”

He even recently made modifications to make sure it runs on the iPhone!