[reaperducer]

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems.

Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.

[aspenmayer]

> there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.

I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?

[mionhe]

Z machines are the interpreters that allow you to play the same game code on whatever hardware you want.

zMud was a MUD client, so in some ways not so dissimilar in the sense that they both allow you to play text-based games.

[reaperducer]

I’ve never heard this term z-machines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

[aspenmayer]

Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.

Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.