"Every time we turned around, someone would come up with an idea. Everything we came up with made more work for us!"- Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling explains the haphazard design process of his classic adventure game Zork. Infocom co-founder and Zork creator Dave Lebling gave an excellent hour-long talk at GDC 2014 explaining, among other things, the creation of both the mainframe and microcomputer versions of Zork, the trials and tribulations of coding a cutting-edge text parser, and what it was like to experiment with self-publishing at a time when most PC games were sold in hand-packed plastic bags. It's well worth watching for anyone with even a passing interest in classic game design. We've taken the liberty of embedding the free video of "Classic Game Postmortem: Zork" above, but you can also watch it here on the GDC Vault.
Video: Zork Classic Game Postmortem from GDC 2014
Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling explains how he created Zork and blazed a trail for interactive fiction game development in a postmortem talk at GDC 2014