It seems to often make it hard to get back where you were, like you go west and then east and end up in a different place. I don't know enough about z-machines to tell why.
This was never a technical oddity. This was generally a tool of verisimilitude: the real world isn't built on a clean square grid. You might have a diagonal hallway or a road that curves or a passageway between two "rooms" with a strange incline.
On the one hand, you could encode the hallway itself or the road curve or the passageway as their own weird segments in the grid. But then maybe you bog the player down in a lot of liminal spaces that don't really add much to the game. On the other hand, you could ask the player to bring or build their own map and pay attention to descriptive text like "to the north is a passage that seems to bend to the east" or far more subtle variations of such.
Zork and many other IF games were built on the premise that people would map things and getting lost or confused by grid breaks was part of the fun. (Going back to, as neighboring comments point out, the original Adventure which was modeling caves and caves have always had strange three-dimensional twistiness that doesn't fit a square grid. Part of the fun was discovering that disconnect between the game mechanics using square grid compass terminology and the digraph of the game spaces being more confusing than that.)
It makes sense then. I haven't played zork for over 35 years. The last couple infocom games I played (Hitchhikers, LGOP) had more regular geometries, in my memory.
It was impressed on me in college how much the MOS 6502 is sort of a fascinating line in the sand for a "clockwork computer". You can visualize all of the 6502 registers and all of its easily addressable RAM in a bitmap you can see on a modern screen and its general clock speeds were so much more relatively close to human scale so you could watch such a visualization compute in (near) real-time.
I remember building my own mini-6502 debugger of my own for an assignment I was having difficulty debugging on the breadboarded hardware in our lab (and also to save me from having to spend all of my waking hours in that lab). I want to say it was in something stupid like PHP at the time, but it was just a quick and dirty hacked together thing I did in like an hour during a lecture for a different class.
I've seen some really cool projects on HN of people building visual/visible 6502 boards. LEDs have gotten so cheap and the 6502 is so easy to replicate in FPGA and other hardware spaces that you can build real neat 6502 computers. Which I think the original homebrew computer club hackers would still respect all these years later. (The 6502 fueled the original home computer revolution and was in so many machines, from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 to the NES and more. It was such a key workhorse chip.) I'm still glad I had a lab course on the 6502 in my college education. (The follow up one with the Motorola 68k was maybe less successful, and mostly taught us why the 68k is the last real breadboardable CPU in so many ways including the way that it frequently burned through breadboards and made most debugging a hardware issue.)
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 30.2 ms ] threadOn the one hand, you could encode the hallway itself or the road curve or the passageway as their own weird segments in the grid. But then maybe you bog the player down in a lot of liminal spaces that don't really add much to the game. On the other hand, you could ask the player to bring or build their own map and pay attention to descriptive text like "to the north is a passage that seems to bend to the east" or far more subtle variations of such.
Zork and many other IF games were built on the premise that people would map things and getting lost or confused by grid breaks was part of the fun. (Going back to, as neighboring comments point out, the original Adventure which was modeling caves and caves have always had strange three-dimensional twistiness that doesn't fit a square grid. Part of the fun was discovering that disconnect between the game mechanics using square grid compass terminology and the digraph of the game spaces being more confusing than that.)
Instead imagine that "GO EAST" takes you onto a winding road.
The road arcs southward and to go back you'd have to "GO NORTH".
Further... some travels in Zork even drop you through a hole (though I forget if it tells you so).
So going East might put you in the basement and there's no way to climb back up.
[1]: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-...
I remember building my own mini-6502 debugger of my own for an assignment I was having difficulty debugging on the breadboarded hardware in our lab (and also to save me from having to spend all of my waking hours in that lab). I want to say it was in something stupid like PHP at the time, but it was just a quick and dirty hacked together thing I did in like an hour during a lecture for a different class.
I've seen some really cool projects on HN of people building visual/visible 6502 boards. LEDs have gotten so cheap and the 6502 is so easy to replicate in FPGA and other hardware spaces that you can build real neat 6502 computers. Which I think the original homebrew computer club hackers would still respect all these years later. (The 6502 fueled the original home computer revolution and was in so many machines, from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 to the NES and more. It was such a key workhorse chip.) I'm still glad I had a lab course on the 6502 in my college education. (The follow up one with the Motorola 68k was maybe less successful, and mostly taught us why the 68k is the last real breadboardable CPU in so many ways including the way that it frequently burned through breadboards and made most debugging a hardware issue.)