An Introduction to Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction, or text adventure games, are one of the oldest forms of computer game. The classical text adventure game (hereon refered to merely as an adventure game) describes the game world to the player in plain text and invites input from the player in the form of simple sentence commands.

The name Zinc refers to something known as the "Z-machine". The Z-machine was invented when one of the early adventure games, a game called "Zork", was being ported to lots of different microcomputers by a company called Infocom. In order to make their task easier, and to help make Zork fit into the limited memory of the computers of the time, they invented a "virtual machine" called the Z machine and wrote Zork for the virtual machine. Then, to run it on a real computer, all they needed to do was to create an interpreter for the particular computer that could run the virtual machine code (which became known as "Z-code". Zinc is one such interpreter.

The Z-machine is now very old. Several groups of people have tried to create newer and better adventure game systems that work in a similar way. One such system is TADS, the Text Adventure Development System. Zinc includes an interpreter that can run TADS version 2 games.