Zork is a very early interactive text adventure game written in 1977. It's a classic adventure that many people remember fondly. When we first got our Echo Dot, we thought it would be a great place to play these kinds of adventure games. Since Zork is now Public Domain, it's a great opportunity to play a favorite from our childhood with Alexa.
We've compiled the original Zork into a Lambda-compatible binary and built a Python wrapper along with intents/utterances to control input and output to the game. It saves your game's progress to S3 according to your user ID and can handle a ton of concurrent users thanks to Lambda. You can simply begin your adventure in Zork and continue exploring the world each day, automatically resuming and saving your game as you play.
There is a Zork skill available for Alexa already, but it's not the complete game. Our implementation is unique because it's using an unmodified executable and simply adapting it to a modern platform, allowing people to experience the full Zork adventure.
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