The Classic Dungeon Adventure Game

This isn't the game that started the Adventure Game craze, the "Colosal Cave Adventure" started that. However, this is the game that spawned commercial computer games around 1980.

When this game appeared at work, seemingly everyone stayed into the evening and was amazed at the detail and puzzles. Forget Myst. This game stretches the imagination and has interesting puzzles.

As was customary at the time, computer games were free. The source code for this one bears an Infocom copyright, however it allows free noncommercial distribution. I obtained it in 1991 and compiled it for MS/DOS. Of course it will run under Windows! The program was written in Fortran, and I'm not providing the source, lest it spoil the game!

Back around 1980, the folks at Infocom wrote a game interpreter and rewrote Zork to run on it, making it possible to play the game on Apples, TRS-80's, CP/M boxes, and other systems of the day rather than being limited to mainframes. THIS program is the original mainframe version. It is equivalent to Zork I + about half of Zork II + the endgame of Zork III.

If by some chance the only version of the game you ever played was on a mainframe, this version may be somewhat of a treat as it is the last mainframe version and has the Bank of Zork and Maze puzzles which didn't appear in early versions.


For all these versions, just unzip the files somewhere and run from that location. These programs run from the command line.

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for DOS and Windows (194k)

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for Mac OS X (270k) (Recompiled - now a 64-bit Intel CPU only binary, also uses static library)

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for Linux (201k). -- built for 32-bit Linux. If you have a 64-bit distribution you will need to add 32-bit support.

SPOILER -- MAP OF DUNGEON (from 1982) with ENDGAME added (7056 × 4050 pixels, 15.7MB) Thanks to Jeremy Kapp for providing a still nicer image, and for adding the endgame map. The next file is still available for those that want the original published map, without the endgame.

SPOILER -- MAP OF DUNGEON (from 1982) (3361x2056 pixels, 7.2MB) Thanks to Jeremy Kapp for providing this much nicer image.