People associate late ‘70s/early ‘80s gaming with Space Invaders and Pac-Man , but away from the arcades, you were likely to find early home computer enthusiasts poring, and scratching their heads, over a very different sort of game. Along with its spiritual predecessor Colossal Cave Adventure , Zork and its sequels pioneered the genre of the text adventure, graphics-less parser-based games that have seen a renaissance years under the more highbrow title “interactive fiction.” As well as being the first of a string of early- and mid-80s hits for its studio, Infocom, Zork was a real achievement from a technical point of view. The game’s popularity was at least partly due to its portability—it could run on a Commodore 64 as easily as it could run on a 8086 PC or a ZX Spectrum, which was a huge advantage in an era where consumers could choose between dozens of microcomputers, each largely incompatible with the others.…