ZorkBot is an AIM interface for an old text adventure game called Dungeon. This game was the predecessor to the Infocom game Zork which was very popular in the late 1980s. [so yes, maybe it should be called DungeonBot, but Zork has much higher name recognition]

Current version: 1.9 with bacon!

How to start a game

It's easy! Just sent an AIM message to the account ZORKBOT. Zorkbot will spawn a separate AIM entity to handle your session, and you will be contacted directly by this account (ZorkBotlet0, Zorkbotlet1, etc.). Once this happens you can close your Zorkbot window as all game functions are now handled through your dedicated session account. You can only have one game session open at a time. If you try to open another session, Zorkbot will ignore you. Also, if you try to communicate with a Zorkbotlet that has not been assigned to you or after your session has timed out, it will ignore you.

Once your game session starts (you'll see something about being in front of a house in the forest), you can type commands to the game as messages in the AIM window, and it responds with the output. If you need help with game commands, try typing help.

Notice: The Zorkbot is subject to the same message rate limitations that we all are, so if it suddenly stops responding, it probably means that it has overstepped its rate limitation and has to wait before it can send again.

What are the commands?

You can type help at any time for information about how to play Dungeon. For your convenience (and because the AIM interface sucks for reading large amounts of text), we've made a web version of the Dungeon help here.

Can I save and restore my games?

Yes. At any time, you can save your game by typing the command SAVE. You may only have one saved game, so saving twice overwrites the previous saved game. To restore your game you type RESTORE.

There is a 10 minute timeout on the game after which you session will be closed. However, when this happens Zorkbot saves your game for you. This save does NOT overwrite your previous saved games. When you come back and start a new game, simply type RESTORE-TIMEOUT to get back to where you were when the game timed out.

More information about the game

Typing info at the game prompt will give you this message which describes what the game is all about and your motivation for playing it.

Technical Details

Dungeon was created at the Programming Technology Division of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. It was inspired by the Adventure game of Crowther and Woods, and the Dungeons and Dragons game of Gygax and Arneson. The original version was written in MDL (alias MUDDLE). It was then translated into FORTRAN IV and was later ported to C.

We found this C code on the web and modified it slightly, then wrapped it with a perl script which handles the interface between Dungeon and AIM. The AIM protocol is handled by the Net::AIM Perl module written by Aryeh Goldsmith. Each new request to ZorkBot spawns a new instance of the Dungeon executeable which is handled by a separate AIM instance [to a maximum of 20 users]. This keeps many users from clogging up the speed limitations imposed on ZorkBot by the AIM protocol.

The vast majority of the coding for ZorkBot was done by MilkmanDan, with a couple minor tweaks and comments and moral support by Mouser. Actually, Mouser just sort of acts as the villiage idiot on this project, while Dan does all the work.