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Written by
Henry E. Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University.
Henry E. Lowood
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Article History

Will Crowther’s Adventure (c. 1975) was the prototype for text-based computer games organized as interactive stories, but in 1977 several students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided that they could write more sophisticated interactive fiction by abandoning FORTRAN, the programming language used for Adventure, in favour of MDL. MDL was a descendant of LISP, a language that grew out of research in artificial intelligence. The characteristics of MDL enabled the students to build a database of objects in their game that greatly simplified the construction of rooms and game items—of which there were roughly 400 in all. The ...(100 of 407 words)

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