D'après http://www.infocom-if.org/company/company.html :

In 1972 "Colossal Cave" (also known as "Adventure"), a text-based game in which you had to collect treasures in a gigantic cave, was written by a man named Willie Crowther, who put it on the university mainframe at Boston University.

It was only rudimentary and lurked around there, until in 1976 it was immensely expanded by another unselfish human being, Don Woods. This improved version became highly popular among college students, who played it by accessing the mainframe over ARPAnet (the ancestor of what today is the Internet) .

After this preliminary exercise Blank, Lebling, Anderson, and yet another student, Bruce Daniels, started with the real project. They designed maps and puzzles for players to solve and named this new endeavor "Zork" - a hacker word floating around at that time, which the three actually used on all their works-in-progress. Later it was decided to change the name to "Dungeon," but, to avoid copyright problems, the much more original name "Zork" was kept.

Lisez la suite sur http://www.infocom-if.org/company/company.html