I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM
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I grew up on the Infocom games and when microsoft actually open-sourced Zork 1/2/3 I really wanted to figure out how to use LLMs to let you type whatever you want, I always found the amount language that the games "understood" to be so limiting - even if it was pretty state of the art at the time.So I figured out how to wrap it with Tambo.. (and run the game engine in the browser) basically whatever you type gets "translated" into zork-speak and passed to the game - and then the LLM takes the game's output and optionally adds flavor. (the little ">_" button at the top exposes the actual game input)What was a big surprise to me is multi-turn instructions - you can ask it to "Explore all the rooms in the house until you can't find any more" and it will plug away at the game for 10+ "turns" at a time... like Claude Code for Zork or something
HN · launched Jan 27, 2026 · 111 upvotes (top 9%) · 1 view
Niche: interactive storytelling platforms · 98 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -43% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- B2C
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 98 launches in interactive storytelling platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes Translating freeform user inputs into valid Infocom Z-machine command verbs and actions using an LLM API wrapper over an open-source Z-machine interpreter is easily achievable via prompt engineering and glue code.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Parser too rigid, narrow puzzle constraints, Certain actions blocked (can't burn letter with matches, can't tear paper), LLM confusion with complex spatial commands
Feature requests: Local/offline version with BYOM (Bring Your Own Model) variant, Improved parser (Z8 over V5), Better explanations for why actions fail
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 237 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 238 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 90 days after the earliest competitor.
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