the final hallway. After the player solves the final puzzles, the Dungeon Master appears and transforms the player to look like himself, signifying the player's succession to his position. Development Inception Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling began developing Zork in May 1977. The four were members of the Dynamic Modelling Group, a computer science research division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer ScienceAnderson, Blank, and Daniels as students and Lebling as a research staff member. Their work was inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-based game that is the first well-known example of interactive fiction and the first well-known adventure game. Adventure was immensely popular among the small population of computer users of the time and a big hit at MIT in early 1977. By the end of May, players had managed to completely solve it. The four programmers began to design a game that would be a "better" text adventure game, with inputs more complex than Adventures two-word commands and puzzles less obtuse. They believed that their division's MDL programming language would be better suited for processing complex text inputs than the Fortran code used in Adventure. The group was familiar with creating video games: Blank and Anderson had worked on a multiplayer trivia game called Trivia (1976), and Lebling was heavily involved with Maze (1973), a multiplayer first-person shooter and the first 3D first-person game ever made. Lebling first created a natural language input system, or parser, that could process typed two-word instructions. Anderson and Blank built a small prototype text game to use it. Zork prototype was built for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 mainframe computer, the only system that supported their programming language. While Lebling took a two-week vacation, Anderson, Blank, and Daniels designed an adventure game concept, which Anderson and Blank then developed as an early version of Zork. This prototype contained simple versions of many concepts seen in the final game, including puzzles and locations. According to Anderson, "it took time for people to learn how to write good problems", and Lebling's first, uncomplex parser was only "almost as smart as Adventures". The game was unnamed, but the group had a habit of naming their programs "zork" until they were completed, a term in the MIT community for an in-development program. The group, referring to themselves as the "implementers", continued working on the game after