\ Credits: (read: where we're from and all that) \
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| History: Crowther and Woods "Collossal Cave" Adventure –> |
/ Zork –> IT Games were the inspiration for Copper->Alfa Mud |
| DikuMUD –> Merc 2.1 –> Rom 2.4b2 –> Ansalon /
\ AnsalonMud derived from ROM with many years of changes. \
| Ansalon started as AlphaMUD in 1996, 1997 became Ansalon |
| DikuMUD by Hans Staerfeldt, Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, |
| Michael Seifert, and Sebastian Hammer |
/ MERC 2.1 code by Hatchet, Furey, and Kahn. /
| ROM 2.4 copyright © 1993-1998 Russ Taylor |
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/ /| /| |\ /
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According to the history of Zork, as written by one of the authors, Zork was officially renamed to Dungeon, then "Bob the lunatic" released a FORTRAN version (using the at-the-time current name of "Dungeon"), then due to legal threats it was renamed back to Zork.
Reference: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/N...
"As a result of the purloined sources at DEC, a lunatic there decided to translate Zork into FORTRAN. We had always assumed this would be impossible: Muddle is very (oops, very) different from FORTRAN, and much more complicated, and we'd used most of its features in designing Zork. The guy who did it was mostly a hardware person, so perhaps he didn't know what he was up against. At any rate, shortly after the Great Blizzard of '78 he had a working version, initially for PDP-11s. Since it was in FORTRAN, it could run on practically anything, and by now it has.
Unfortunately, at some point in the preceding year we (no one will now admit to suggesting the idea) had decided to change the name of the game. Zork was too much of a nonsense word, not descriptive of the game, etc., etc., etc. Silly as it sounds, we eventually started calling it Dungeon. (Dave admits to suggesting the new name, but that's only a minor sin.) When Bob the lunatic released his FORTRAN version to the DEC users' group, that was the name he used. I'm sure many people have noticed a curious similarity between the Dungeon game they played on their friendly IBM 4341 and the Zork I they played on their equally friendly IBM PC; now you know why.
Fortunately for us, a certain company (which shall remain nameless) decided to claim that it had trademark rights to the name Dungeon, as a result of certain games that it sold. We didn't agree (and MIT had some very expensive lawyers on retainer who agreed with us), but it encouraged us to do the right thing, and not hide our "Zorks" under a bushel."