ABSTRACT
Games are inevitable. People play games. Even animals play games. Pretty much as soon as there were computers, there were computer games. The effect of the IBM PC combined with Lotus 1-2-3 can’t be overstated. They took the revolution in personal computers and made it legit. Chronologically, Microsoft’s first game was an unlicensed, but mostly faithful to the original version of Will Crowther and Don Woods’ Colossal Caves: Adventure text-based game for the TRS-80, published in 1979 and later ported to Apple II and the brand-new IBM PC in 1981. Zork was one of the most popular text adventure games in the early 1980s and the product that launched the quintessential text adventure game company, Infocom. In 1980, Joel Berez remembers sending a query about Zork, which was first launched on a PDP-11, to several publishers, including Microsoft. Years later, at a launch event for a new PC clone, Berez met Bill Gates for the first time.
