And the answer is…

For those who didn't quite see it in the comments, the mystery object is a printout of an entire walkthrough of the original game of Zork, one of the earliest interactive fiction games. Adventure was the first widely-known entry in the genre, but Zork really made huge strides in both the breadth of the virtual world as well as the character's interaction with that world. The printout pictured in the prior story was created on February 18th, 1980, by myself and a good friend who was in his first or second year at MIT.

At the time, I was 15 and my buddy Patrick was 19. These were the early days of computing, just over two years into the Apple ]['s existence. So while graphical games existed (Mystery House was released in 1980, for example), the capabilities of the machine made for very limited graphics--check the screenshot on the Wikipedia page for proof. As such, interactive fiction offered a more complete escape into the gaming world, as your mind did the work of creating whatever "graphics" the game required, based on the descriptions provided by the developers.

It was also the very early days of the internet, meaning it basically didn't exist. Its predecessor, ARPANET, was just getting going. Somehow, probably through a computer club at high school, I was introduced to ARPANET and the MDL machine at MIT. This machine allowed free guest account signups, and they had Zork installed for anyone to play. That's about all it took for me to get hooked, even over a 300 baud modem working on a dumb terminal with thermal paper!

Read on for a bit more about Zork, online gaming in the very early 1980s, and that monster printout...

After discovering the MDL machine and Zork, Patrick and I spent months working our way through the GUE (Great Underground Empire), which is the generic name for the (primarily) underground world of Zork. (See, even in the old days, the games were set underground, long before that became the norm in first person shooters!)

One of the things that made Zork so much fun to play was the command parser. Adventure's parser handled two-word commands only, in the form of verb noun. Take knife or move rock, for instance. Zork, on the other hand, let you speak to it in full sentences, and you could string commands together, as in: Put bottle in sack. In Adventure, you'd say Put bottle, then Adventure would ask "Where would you like me to put the bottle?" and you'd reply In sack. You could also give Zork multiple commands on one line, saving time while navigating: Take leaflet. N. NE. W. Drop leaflet. Get shovel. The advanced parser made interacting with the world of Zork much simpler.

The puzzles in the original Zork ranged from the mostly trivial (figuring out how to get into the dungeon in the first place) to the incredibly complex (I recall that the room with the sliding walls was quite tricky, as was getting the balloon assembled). Patrick and I worked through the game, relatively slowly but steadily over a period of many months. As we went, we mapped out the dungeon on large mainframe printer paper--each sheet is maybe 16" wide, ideal for mapping. I think I actually had our original maps until a few years ago, but they (sadly) finally disintegrated at some point. Finally, we had solved it--we finished the last puzzle, and had maxed out our score (616 points were possible in the original game). There was also an end game to be played, but that would wait for another day.

At that point, we thought it'd be interesting to try to play the game through from start to finish (we'd been using save and restore to make progress through the game). Getting ready to do this also took some time, as we wanted to figure out the best way to solve Zork, minimizing backtracking (the number of moves you used was a factor in your "rank," which was delivered with your score). Eventually, we'd mapped out a strategy and chose a day for the play through. I honestly don't recall how long it took to proceed through the game, but it was a non-trivial amount of time. Everything basically worked perfectly, though there are a couple lines that blurred together when the output jammed at one point. When we were done, we had the 70-foot-long roll of paper you see in the first story.

We were most curious to see what our ranking was at the end. Needless to say, we were both quite surprised when we typed score for the last time:

Apparently 964 moves shouldn't have been enough to finish the game with a max score, as we were deemed "Cheaters!" So much for the trip in the wayback machine.

Nowadays, of course, anyone can play Zork, even on OS X. You just need two things--an interpreter for interactive fiction games, and the data files for Zork. My current fave interpreter is Zoom, and you can find many interactive fiction games (including zdungeon.z5, the original Zork) on this FTP site. From there, it's trivial to get it running, and still, after all these years, quite fun to play. I've forgotten most of the map and many of the puzzles, so it's much like starting over (though I do have a key available, albeit a somewhat large, fragile, and unwieldy key!)

Obligatory "small world" story

As with many friends from high school, I lost track of Patrick for quite a while--especially since we moved back to Colorado after our year in Massachusetts. In late 1989, I went to work for Apple (after having lived in Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York since high school), and was quite surprised to find out (through a friend of my father) that Patrick worked there as well! We met for lunch one day, caught up on nine years of life, and have remained friends to this day. Weird the way the world works sometimes!