Playing Zork On… A Messageboard?

Over at Idle Thumbs, they’ve just set up a ‘Text Adventure’ subforum, and indeed, they’ve set up a really neat concept - people can collaboratively play classic Z-machine text adventures on a normal messageboard, thanks to some neat coding.
As the FAQ post explains: “Our resident super computer Ziggy serves up the current move, and all you have to do is reply to the thread with the next move, such as “Go north”. Ziggy will then respond. It’s basically an MMO text adventure.”
Here’s the current post, for Zork, and it’s pretty cool how the various participants are using # comments among themselves to discuss their tactics: “Ack, no! We needed the lunch for the cyclops… Oh didn’t know that. isn’t there an other way past him? like telling a long story so he’ll fall asleep?… We can use the sack to put on the cyclops’s head.” [Via Andy Baio.]

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Original post by editors@gamesetwatch.com (simonc) and software by Elliott Back